EACOP and Tilenga: nine years for their case, four days for the State’s

On 4 December 2023 the Government of Uganda filed an application to take possession of land belonging to 42 households in Buliisa and Hoima who had refused the compensation offered for TotalEnergies' Tilenga development. The High Court at Hoima heard it on 8 December. Four days.[1]

Justice Jesse Byaruhanga ordered the government to deposit UGX 945,780,675 — about USD 252,000 — and granted vacant possession of 59.674 acres for petroleum activities. Some of the households learned there were proceedings against them the day before the hearing.[1]

Those same households had a compensation complaint of their own, filed in 2014. At the time of the possession order it had been pending nine years.[1]

The same court system moved at two speeds for the same dispute, depending on who was asking.

The valuation-date problem, stated as plainly as it ever gets

The households' objection was not simply that the money was too little in the abstract. It was that the offer rested on 2019 assessments, and that land values in the Albertine region had risen materially in the four years since.[1]

This is the most predictable failure in East African land acquisition and one of the least often designed for. A valuation is a statement about a market on a date. Uganda's statutory scheme compensates by reference to value with a disturbance allowance on top, and the further the payment date drifts from the valuation date, the less the award resembles the thing it was meant to replace.[4] PS-5 sets a stricter test still — compensation at full replacement cost, meaning the claimant can actually acquire an equivalent asset — and an award computed on stale rates fails that test arithmetically, whatever the domestic position on its validity.[5][6]

The perverse incentive is obvious once stated. Where rates are fixed at first assessment and never revised, delay transfers value from the claimant to the acquiring party, and the party that controls the timetable is not the claimant. A refusal to accept an offer then extends the delay that erodes it further.

Refusal is not a strategy the system rewards

Practitioners often describe a holdout as someone with leverage. Hoima shows what leverage actually looks like on the ground. The households declined the offer, and the mechanism that resolved the impasse was an application for vacant possession heard within a working week, against people who in some cases had a day's notice, on a valuation they had already rejected as out of date.[1]

For a RAP, the operational consequence is that the grievance mechanism has to be capable of resolving a valuation dispute faster than the project's own possession timetable. If it cannot — if a rate objection takes years while a possession application takes days — then the mechanism is not a remedy, it is a queue. That is a design parameter, and it can be measured: median days from rate objection lodged to determination, compared against median days from offer to possession. Most projects have never computed either.

The corridor's other forum, and what happened there

The Tilenga and EACOP projects have also been litigated in France under the 2017 duty of vigilance law, which requires large French companies to maintain a plan to prevent grave harm to human rights and the environment. Six NGOs — Friends of the Earth France, Survie, AFIEGO, CRED, NAPE and NAVODA — brought the first courtroom test of that statute, alleging that land had been taken from very large numbers of people without adequate compensation.[3]

On 28 February 2023 the Paris Civil Court declared the claim inadmissible. Not on the merits: the court held that the claimants' submissions were substantially different from the formal notice they had served on the company in 2019, and that the procedural requirement had therefore not been met.[2] A further action was brought in 2023 by community members and Ugandan and French civil-society organisations.[3]

Set the two forums side by side and the pattern is the same one that decided Kenya's SGR petition: in both, the substantive question went unanswered because a procedural record did not line up. Whichever side you act for, the discipline is identical — the claim you make at the end must be the claim you documented at the beginning.

What the register had to carry

• Valuation date and payment date, per parcel, with the elapsed interval computed as a live field rather than derivable in principle. A project that cannot report its own median offer-to-payment interval cannot know whether its awards still meet replacement cost.
• A rate-revision rule agreed in advance: the trigger (elapsed months, or an index movement), the index or re-survey method, and who authorises the uplift. Absent a rule, revision becomes a concession negotiated under pressure, which is slower and less defensible than a formula.
• Refusal recorded as a status, not an absence. A claimant who declines an offer must remain an open case with a disagreement reason, a valuation on file and a next step — not fall out of the payment report because nothing was disbursed.
• Notice of any possession application, evidenced to the affected person with date and mode of service. The complaint that households learned of proceedings the day before is an evidentiary allegation, and the only answer to it is a service record.
• Grievance clock versus possession clock, reported together, because the ratio between them is the honest measure of whether the mechanism works.

What this case does not establish

This account rests on contemporaneous reporting of the Hoima order and on case profiles of the French proceedings, all of which resolve publicly; it uses no project register and no confidential document. The reported account of the 8 December 2023 order does not set out the judge's detailed reasoning, so nothing here should be read as a characterisation of the court's reasons — only of the dates, the sums and the orders made.[1] The Paris dismissal was on admissibility and made no finding on whether the allegations were true. The Ugandan households' 2014 claim was, on the material cited, still undetermined; nothing here assumes its outcome. This is not legal advice on Ugandan compulsory acquisition or on French vigilance law.