Kabaale refinery: a compensation claim that has outlived the project that caused it

In 2012 the Government of Uganda acquired roughly 29 square kilometres across 13 villages in Buseruka sub-county, Hoima District, for an oil refinery, an airport and what is now the Kabalega industrial park. More than 7,000 people were displaced. The Resettlement Action Plan offered each household a choice: cash compensation, or a house built by the government at a resettlement site.[1]

A group of project-affected persons went to the High Court in Kampala in 2014, contending that the rates applied to them were unfair and that neighbouring villages in the same locality had been compensated at different rates.[1] Their case was listed for substantive hearing more than a decade later.[2] In the intervening years the refinery was redesigned, refinanced and re-announced, and the land was renamed.

The project changed identity three times. The compensation claim did not move at all.

What happened to the file

The procedural history is the part practitioners should sit with. The claim was filed at the High Court in Kampala, referred to the High Court at Masindi, returned to Kampala, and then sent to the High Court at Hoima — where, on the residents' account, the files could not be traced.[1] Hearings have been listed and adjourned since.[3]

Set aside the question of fault. The operational fact is that a compensation dispute concerning thousands of people survived for over a decade as paper moving between registries, and that at one point the paper's location was itself in doubt. A resettlement register held by the project would not have cured the court's file management — but it would have meant that the underlying facts of each claimant's entitlement did not depend on that file being findable.

The rate-consistency complaint

The central grievance reported is not that a valuation method was wrong in theory. It is that "some villages in the same locality were compensated using different rates."[1] Reported awards ran in the region of UGX 3.5–4.5 million per acre, with the statutory disturbance allowance applied on top.

Whether or not the differential was justified — district rate schedules do change between financial years, and land genuinely differs across a 29 km² footprint — this is a category of dispute that is won or lost entirely on the record. A project that can show, per parcel, which approved rate schedule was applied, on what date, under which district authority, and why a neighbouring parcel attracted a different figure, has an answer. A project that cannot has an allegation of arbitrariness it cannot rebut, and the passage of years makes the rebuttal harder, not easier: the valuers move on, the field notes disperse, and what remains is a number in a schedule.

Uganda's own framework compensates by reference to approved district rates for crops and non-permanent buildings, with the disturbance allowance under section 77 of the Land Act on top.[4] That machinery assumes the rate in force at the material date is identifiable. Recording the schedule and its date against every affected asset is a trivial data-modelling decision at survey time and an unrecoverable omission afterwards.

Cash or a house: an option that has to stay auditable

Where a RAP offers an election between cash and replacement housing, the election itself becomes an entitlement fact that has to be captured, dated, evidenced and then tracked to delivery. Residents report that dozens of families who chose resettlement had still not received houses years afterwards.[1]

That is a specific, checkable class of failure, and it is invisible in any report that measures completion by disbursement. A household that elected housing and received none is not an unpaid claimant in the financial system — there is no outstanding payment against its name. It falls out of the payment report entirely, and only a delivery register keyed to the election will surface it. PS-5 requires that displaced persons be offered a choice where feasible and that the resettlement outcome be verified, not merely transacted.[5][6]

What the register had to carry

• Rate schedule identity per asset: the approved district schedule, its effective date, the issuing authority, and the reason for any variation between neighbouring parcels. This is the single field that answers the complaint actually made here.
• The election, and its delivery state — cash or housing, chosen on a date, evidenced by a signed record, tracked through construction, handover and title to a closure document. Housing elections must be reportable separately from payments or they disappear.
• A claimant-side copy of the entitlement record. Where a dispute may outlive the institutions handling it, the affected person should hold their own evidence of what was measured, offered and agreed.
• Succession fields. Over a decade, claimants die. Unless the register anticipates heirs and estate representation, the claim becomes unresolvable on its own terms even if the court is ready to hear it.
• An open-dispute status with an age. A grievance without an age field cannot be escalated, because nobody can see it getting old.

What this case does not establish

The claim described here was, on the material cited, still awaiting substantive determination; nothing above assumes its outcome or asserts that the compensation paid was in fact unlawful. Several details — the untraced files, the differential rates, the undelivered houses — are the residents' account as carried by advocacy and news reporting, not findings of a court or of an independent audit, and they are attributed here rather than adopted. The figures for area, population displaced and rates come from that same reporting and have not been verified against a project register, to which this article had no access. This is not legal advice on Ugandan compulsory acquisition.