Mubende and Kassanda: an eviction, a decade on

The removal of artisanal miners from goldfields in Mubende and Kassanda districts displaced a very large informal workforce and remains one of the most contested events in Uganda's recent mining history. Compensation and resettlement questions have persisted for years.

What made the episode unusual, relative to smaller localised evictions elsewhere in the country, was its scale and its documentation. Human rights organisations, domestic media and international observers all tracked the aftermath closely, which means the case has entered the reference set that communities, investors and civil society groups now cite whenever a new licence is proposed anywhere in the country.

Communities elsewhere in the country now read the arrival of a licence-holder through that precedent. Operators inherit a trust deficit they did not create, and the cost of overcoming it is a real line in a development budget.

That inherited distrust is asymmetric in an important way: a single high-profile failure of this kind casts a longer shadow than several well-handled resettlements, because it confirms the worst-case scenario communities already fear rather than the median outcome. Operators who behave well are, in effect, competing against a reputational baseline set by the worst precedent rather than an average one.

Early engagement with existing workings, negotiated coexistence or absorption of artisanal labour into the formal workforce, and documented compensation. These are cheaper than the alternative in every case where the alternative has been tested.

A licence-holder or government official could reasonably argue that some evictions are unavoidable where informal working genuinely conflicts with a legally granted mineral right, and that indefinitely delaying enforcement to negotiate with every informal occupant would make formal investment in central Uganda's goldfields effectively impossible, penalising the licensed operator for the state's own historic failure to police encroachment earlier.

There is real substance to that position: not every artisanal presence on licensed ground represents a legitimate, negotiable claim, and operators cannot be expected to fund an indefinite coexistence with occupants who have no tenure basis at all. Our point is not that eviction is never justified, it is that the manner and sequencing of the Mubende and Kassanda episode, and the absence of a resolved compensation process years later, is what generated the durable reputational cost, not the underlying legal right to enforce a licence.