Eighty-four percent of the population of Uganda are rural subsistence farmers. They are resisting both rampant land grabbing and US ally General Yoweri Museveni’s attempt to rule for life. I spoke to Phil Wilmot, an American-born activist who now lives in rural Uganda...[Excerpts of the interview]

 

The land grabbing is one of the manifestations of dictatorship in northern Uganda and not only northern Uganda—all across Uganda and in much of Africa. A multinational company or a foreign investor or even a huge domestic investor...will have their eye on a piece of land or maybe a mine, and then they will work with the government or other governments in Africa to forcefully evict the people who live there. In 2012, we started Solidarity Uganda to resist these evictions and land grabs. We started in a district called Amuru, which borders the River Nile in northern Uganda. This is an oil rich and very fertile area. Over the course of several years, we worked with the community there to chase away land grabbers and multinational corporations. One was the Madhvani Group, which wanted to plant sugarcane on their land, but there were also a number of oil companies. The oil companies usually operate behind obscure shell companies that do “research” and survey land. Ironically, they’ll sometimes contract with the Uganda Wildlife Authority to survey land for oil drilling or some other form of resource extraction. This is very common, and we've worked with a number of communities across Uganda who have been able to protect their land from these land grabbers.

 

Madhvani recently announced that they are backing out of all efforts to develop sugarcane projects in Amuru. They said that the environment was "too hostile" to carry on with business there. It was a big victory, but the battles aren't over because there are plenty of foreign investors and multinationals still interested in taking their land. Amuru's people deserve the credit for liberating themselves. Solidarity Uganda merely played a supportive role in terms of training, organizing, and on occasion providing resources to the local people, plus national and international advocacy.