Compulsory acquisition across East Africa: what differs and what does not

Five East African jurisdictions, five different compulsory acquisition regimes, and one pattern that repeats in all of them: a lawful process that identifies recognised interests, compensates them at a valuation derived from national practice, and stops at payment. Everything a lender standard adds sits beyond that stopping point.

This is a structural comparison, not legal advice, and each framework has been amended repeatedly. Verify current instruments and practice before relying on any of it.

What is common

• Constitutional protection of property with an exception for public purpose, subject to compensation. The exception is what every acquisition runs through.
• A notice, inquiry and award sequence, with an objection route and ultimately a court.
• Valuation by or approved through a state valuation function, often against published rate schedules for crops and structures.
• Recognition of customary tenure in some form, though what follows from that recognition differs considerably.
• An interval between award and payment that is longer in practice than in the statute.

What differs, and where it matters

Three differences change how a RAP is built. The first is whether land itself is compensable or only improvements on it — where the state holds radical title and pays for unexhausted improvements, the gap to replacement cost is structural rather than incidental.

The second is the treatment of customary and community land: whether it is a recognised right equivalent to a granted one, whether communal decisions are required before individual compensation, and who is authorised to receive payment on behalf of a group.

The third is institutional: whether one national body runs acquisition or each sector ministry does its own; whether valuation approval is centralised; and how funds are appropriated. This determines the schedule more than the substantive law does.[4]

The legal frameworks differ most in vocabulary and least in outcome. In all five, a household that held no recognised interest receives nothing unless a project decides otherwise.

The three gaps that appear everywhere

Eligibility without recognised interest

No national regime in the region compensates people with no recognisable claim. Every international standard requires assistance for them. This is the largest and most consistent gap, and it is where most of a RAP's additional cost and effort goes.[1]

Replacement cost

National valuation practice produces market value of the interest taken, frequently via schedules that lag. The standards require the cost of obtaining an equivalent asset, without depreciation and including transaction costs. The two diverge, and the divergence has to be measured rather than assumed away.[2]

Livelihood restoration

No compulsory acquisition statute in the region imposes an obligation to restore livelihoods after payment. It is entirely a standards-derived obligation, it runs for years, and it is the one most often committed to and least often measured.[3]

Practical implications for a regional programme

A transboundary project — an interconnector, a corridor, a pipeline — faces different statutes on each side of a border and one set of lender requirements across the whole thing. Running separate national processes with separate compensation policies produces neighbouring communities paid differently for identical losses, which is indefensible whatever each national process permitted.

The workable structure is one project compensation policy set at the level of the most demanding applicable requirement, applied uniformly, with each national statutory process followed underneath it. Where several lenders are involved, evidentiary expectations differ more than substantive ones, so scope the record-keeping to the strictest regime in the syndicate.[5]