As a child growing up in Masaka, southern Uganda, Hilda Nakabuye’s family, like so many others, depended on farming to make a living. But ever-increasing heat, drought, and intense and erratic rainfall, all made worse by climate change, led to repeated harvest failures.
Eventually, her family had to give up the farm and relocate to Kampala. There, in early 2019, Nakabuye launched Uganda’s section of Fridays for Future, inspired by images of Greta Thunberg protesting outside the Swedish parliament in 2018.
Her activism focuses on education. “It’s different here than in Europe. A lot of people simply don’t know what’s happening. And those who do often can’t speak out,” she says.
“There’s greenwashing, there’s denial,” she says, but the overall story is of a growing youth movement trying to “break through” to the decision-making process, which “we’re still mostly shut out of.”
Friday’s For Future Uganda now numbers over 53,000 members, most of them young, and as in Europe, it is engaged in climate strikes, much of it directed against a single project: the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).
The project is led by France’s TotalEnergies and China’s CNOOC, with the aim of transporting crude oil over 1,443km from Uganda’s Lake Albert oil fields to the Tanzanian port of Tanga via a heated pipeline.
If completed, it would cut through sensitive ecosystems and displace thousands of people. But many Ugandans continue to see the project as a boon and a way for the country to increase its wealth. “This is a country that’s never had an oil project before,” says Nakabuye. “People are being told they’ll benefit.”
Indeed, when an Australian wildcatter discovered the oil reservoir in 2006, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, in office since 1986, convened a national prayer festival, during which he thanked God "for having created for us a rift valley 25 million years ago" and for providing "the wisdom and foresight to develop the capacity to discover this oil."
“Europeans make it sound good on paper,” she says. “But a lot of it benefits Europe more than us. Germany, for instance: we export food and get plastic waste in return.”
But Nakabuye warns it may play out differently: “We’ve seen this before with copper. It was extracted, exported, and now no one here can name a single product made from it in Uganda.”
Despite many of the most powerful people in the country standing to benefit from EACOP, activists have so far managed to convince several international banks to pull out of the pipeline project.
Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Santander and more have all ruled out financing EACOP, citing human rights concerns, and Uganda’s energy ministry admitted late last year that debt talks had stalled.
“That’s been our gap,” says Nakabuye. “The project has the permits. It doesn’t yet have the finance and insurance.”
But their actions have come at a cost. “We’ve seen arrests, detentions, even kidnappings. Last year, an activist was abducted and left for dead. The people meant to protect communities are often the ones violating them,” says Nakabuye. “Uganda’s civic space was already tight. The back and forth about the oil has made things worse,” she adds.
Independent reports have documented harassment, forced evictions and displacement of the local populace by Uganda Peoples' Defence Forces (UPDF) personnel.
The EU has positioned itself as a leader in global climate diplomacy, and is steaming ahead with plans to connect Africa’s resource wealth to its own industries, promising to create local value. But Nakabuye is sceptical of the European-African partnership when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.
“Europeans make it sound good on paper,” she says. “But a lot of it benefits Europe more than us. Germany, for instance: we export food and get plastic waste in return.”
Pretending that the auctioning off of oil and minerals in Congo benefits the local population is “absurd,” she adds.
Carbon markets, another favourite tool promoted by European donors as a way to channel funds into conservation, are, in Nakabuye’s view, just greenwashing. “It’s not a solution,” she said.
The annual UN climate summits, where she has repeatedly called for a just transition, are also becoming increasingly disillusioning. “We were hoping for real commitments on climate finance,” she said. “We’re now talking about needing three to five trillion [dollars], but we’re still stuck on billions. There’s just no political will.”
Despite this, Nakabuye sees hope in the growing youth movement across Africa. Fridays for Future has taken root in Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. “We share events, opportunities, and media spaces. We support each other. We’re pushing for global decisions together.”
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Wester is a journalist from the Netherlands with a focus on the green economy. He joined EUobserver in September 2021. Previously he was editor-in-chief of Vice, Motherboard, a science-based website, and climate economy journalist for The Correspondent.
Wester is a journalist from the Netherlands with a focus on the green economy. He joined EUobserver in September 2021. Previously he was editor-in-chief of Vice, Motherboard, a science-based website, and climate economy journalist for The Correspondent.