New report by Global Witness
A new report by Global Witness alleges that Uganda’s mining sector is built on endemic corruption and mismanagement. In June, natural resources watchdog Global Witness published a report entitled ‘Undermined’, the culmination of an 18-month investigation into corruption in the Ugandan mining industry. The report presents evidence of a mineral licensing system that is left open to abuse by an almost total lack of transparency, a problem Global Witness’s investigators encountered first-hand while working to gather information.
“The licence documents themselves are kept in hard copy in the DGSM [Directorate of Geological Survey and Mines], and they’re not very easily available. We did manage to view a few documents when we went and requested them, but it wasn’t always very easy to go and see those. It means that there’s then a lack of oversight", says Global Witness Uganda campaign leader George Boden.