On: EACOP: Ugandan farmers sue UK company in London

July 12, 2026

A pipeline runs from Uganda to Tanzania. A British company builds it. Ugandan farmers sue in London. Consider the geometry of this arrangement - who is displaced, who profits, who adjudicates - and you have the entire institution laid bare more honestly than any charter could state it.

The revenue trace is immediate. The pipeline’s value flows to shareholders in London and Geneva. The land beneath it belongs to people who hold no equity in the venture, whose consent was never purchased at a price they set but extracted through a mechanism designed by the very parties who benefit from its cheapness. This is not a contract. A contract requires parties who meet with roughly equal capacity to walk away. Where one party cannot walk away - because the pipe is coming regardless, because the state has already sold the easement, because the compensation was fixed before the negotiation began - the transaction is a transfer dressed in the language of agreement.

That the farmers must sue in London rather than in Kampala tells you everything about where sovereignty actually resides. The colonial architecture has not been dismantled. It has been re-financed. The Ugandan courts presumably exist. Whether they function when the interests of foreign capital are at stake is a question the farmers’ choice of forum already answers.

It will be argued that infrastructure of this scale requires consolidated authority and that individual landholders cannot veto projects of national importance. The argument has merit. But note the asymmetry: the “national importance” is defined by those who capture the revenue, while the costs are borne by those who do not. A pipeline that enriches foreign shareholders while displacing local farmers serves a nation only if the nation is defined as its balance sheet rather than its people.

The mechanism is the charter. The rest is press.