Article 26 and the RAP: what Uganda’s constitutional compensation guarantee does not answer

1. The constitutional floor

Article 26(2)(b) protects a person from compulsory acquisition or possession unless the acquisition is necessary for a public purpose and there is prompt payment of fair and adequate compensation, prior to the taking of possession or acquisition. [1] Each word matters: adequacy is about amount, promptness about timing, and prior payment about sequence.

The provision is a protection against uncompensated taking. It is not a complete RAP specification. It does not, by itself, describe a census, a cut-off-date process, livelihood restoration indicators or a project-level grievance channel — each of which is required of a lender-financed project by instruments outside the Constitution. [4][5] The scope of Article 26 has itself been politically contested: the 2017 proposal to amend it, so that a disputed award would not delay the Government taking possession, was the subject of sustained constitutional criticism precisely because it would have inverted the sequencing the sub-article protects. [6]

2. The statutory process around it

The Land Acquisition Act, Cap. 226 supplies the statutory machinery for compulsory acquisition, [2] while the Land Act, Cap. 227 supplies the tenure and compensation context in which interests are assessed — including the disturbance allowance under section 77. [3] The acquiring authority therefore needs more than an engineering footprint: it needs a lawful process and an evidence record capable of showing who was affected and how the award was reached.

A project that treats an acquisition award as the end of the social assessment has answered the constitutional question of compensation for a recognised interest, but may not have answered the lender question of whether project-affected people can restore their living standards.

3. The lender layer

IFC PS-5 and its Guidance Note extend the operational inquiry beyond title. They require attention to people without formal rights, economic displacement, replacement cost, livelihood restoration and accessible grievance mechanisms. [4][5] These are additional commitments, not arguments that national law can be ignored.

The practical legal mistake is to present the two regimes as competitors. The defensible RAP maps the constitutional and statutory steps, then records the additional standard obligations and the evidence for each.

4. Research gap

Uganda needs empirical work that traces Article 26 cases from notice through payment, possession and livelihood outcome. The key unanswered question is not whether compensation was legally due, but how often timing, adequacy and restoration diverged for different tenure and vulnerability groups. Two propositions are separately testable against the record: that the constitutional sequencing duty [1] is breached most often where possession is taken under urgency, and that the statutory award [2][3] and the replacement-cost measure [4] diverge systematically for depreciated rural structures rather than at random.