The smell hits you before the sight does. Charcoal smoke hanging in the air where the tree canopy used to be. Then the stumps come into view, hundreds of them, some freshly cut, their pale wood still bright against the red earth. This is Bugoma, or what remains of it. One of Uganda’s oldest and most extraordinary forests is slowly being devoured.
On Friday, Prime Minister of Uganda Hon Robinah Nabbanja stood at the edge of Kikuube District and did not look away. She had come to preside over something conservationists had been pushing for years the official handover of Bugoma Central Forest Reserve from the National Forestry Authority to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, Uganda’s Government agency responsible for the management and protection of Wildlife in and outside protected areas.
“Government could not continue to watch the endless degradation of Bugoma Forest,” she said. “This handover demonstrates our commitment to protecting Uganda’s natural heritage and ensuring that this important ecosystem is safeguarded for present and future generations.”
It was a moment that felt both overdue and urgent. Overdue, because the warning signs have been visible for over a decade. Urgent, because in 2026 alone, more than 4,000 hectares have already been cleared.
Before getting into the destruction, it’s worth pausing on what exactly is at stake.
Bugoma is not just a forest. It sits in the Albertine Rift Valley, the Geological seam running along Uganda’s western edge, the same landscape that holds Lake Albert and some of the most biologically rich terrain in Africa.
Gazetted in 1932, the reserve stretches across 41,144 hectares of lowland tropical forest and connects Murchison Falls National Park to the north with the Semliki Reserve to the south.
Take Bugoma out of that chain, and you break the corridor.
The wildlife inside is staggering. Over 500 tree species, more than 200 bird species, including the Grey Parrot and African crowned eagle, Elephants, Buffaloes, Uganda Kobs, and multiple species of monkey. The forest’s two rivers, the Nkuse and Rutoha, flow into Lake Albert and supply water to communities across the region.
The animal that defines Bugoma more than any other, though, is the chimpanzee. A 2010 survey by the Jane Goodall Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF counted around 580 individuals in the reserve. Together with Budongo Forest to the north, the broader landscape holds an estimated 1,157 chimpanzees.
Last year, Bugoma became Uganda’s newest chimpanzee trekking destination, with 140 habituated individuals divided between a tourism troop and a research troop.
Then there is the Ugandan mangabey, Lophocebus ugandae, a primate found nowhere else on earth. It has disappeared from every other forest in the region. Bugoma is the last place it exists. For the mangabey, this forest is not just an important habitat. It is the whole world.
When His Excellency President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni issued his directive in February, he included a detail that said more than any statistic could. He remembered flying over Bugoma after the bush war. “There was no human settlement,” he wrote, “just as was the case in the Zoka Forest. Therefore, all encroachment is recent and deliberate, knowing that they are invading government property.”
He’s right that it is recent. And much of it traces back to a single moment in 2016.
That August, the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom one of Uganda’s five traditional kingdoms, claimed 5,700 hectares within Bugoma’s boundaries as ancestral land. Four days later, the kingdom transferred the title to Hoima Sugar Limited, a sugarcane company looking to expand. The speed of that transfer raised eyebrows at the time and the controversy has never fully settled.
The legal backstory is genuinely complicated. In 1966, President Milton Obote abolished Uganda’s traditional kingdoms and seized their lands. The 1993 Restitution Act partially reversed this, returning property to some kingdoms, including land in Kyangwali that overlapped with Bugoma. The Bunyoro Kingdom argued it was simply exercising its restored rights. The National Forest Authority argued it was handing a protected forest to a corporation.
The NFA took it to court. In April 2019, the NFA lost and was ordered to pull its guards from the disputed land. Then in August 2020, NEMA issued Hoima Sugar an environmental certificate to develop 22 square miles of the area. The legal way was clear.
A second company, MZ Agencies Limited, followed a similar path, acquiring a freehold title over around 665 hectares in Kabwoya sub-county in September 2018. By May 2020, chainsaws were running inside the disputed land.
Costantino Tessarin, the Chairperson of the Association for Conservation of Bugoma Forest, who also runs an ecolodge within Bugoma and has spent years documenting the destruction, watched it happen. “On the 23rd of May, MZ Agencies took over the area they are claiming and started clearing the forest with chainsaws,” he said.
What followed the corporate clearing was, arguably, worse. Once the legal buffer was gone, the opportunists arrived. Illegal loggers came for the mahogany. Cattle herders burned patches of understory to open pasture. Farmers planted maize, beans, sorghum, and cannabis in the clearings. Charcoal burners, some of them, according to Museveni’s letter, allegedly UPDF soldiers, kept their kilns going through the night.
By 2021, Global Forest Watch data showed Bugoma had lost 17 percent of its cover between 2001 and 2020, roughly 7,355 hectares. Then things got worse. By 2025, the total loss had reached 7,808 hectares. This year alone, another 4,084 hectares have been stripped.
“It is painful to see Bugoma being cut down by very powerful people in government,” said Silverious Tumusime, Kikuube’s secretary for production, last June. “We know how dangerous it is to lose these forests. We have seen landslides in Kasese and Bududa.”
There is a habit in environmental coverage of treating destruction as abstract hectares lost, percentages down and species at risk. In Bugoma, the consequences are immediate and physical.
The forest regulates rainfall across western Uganda. Its canopy holds the soil in place. The Kabalega Hydroelectric Power Dam on the River Wambabya, which generates 9 megawatts for local communities, is reportedly silting up because, without forest upstream to anchor the soil, the river carries mud instead of clean water.
For chimpanzees, the situation has become desperate. As the trees disappear, animals are hemmed into smaller and smaller patches, cut off from each other, unable to find enough food or mates. They venture onto farms. Farmers protecting their crops kill them.
“Most of the chimpanzees in that forest were killed in the process of clearing their habitat for cultivation,” one conservationist from the Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda said in 2022. “The few ones in small forest places cannot reproduce because of the current bad conditions.”
The isolation problem runs deeper than individual animals. Fauna & Flora International, which has worked in the Budongo-Bugoma landscape since 2014, points to what happens when forest corridors are severed chimpanzee groups lose contact with each other, genetic diversity collapses, and what looks like a viable population becomes, quietly, a dying one.
Scientists estimated that at least 450 square kilometres of corridor between Budongo and Bugoma vanished between 2000 and 2010 alone, before the corporate encroachment even peaked.
The same logic applies to Elephants, to Uganda Kobs, to every wide-ranging animal that depends on connected habitat. Break the chain, and you turn what appeared to be a thriving population into isolated clusters of animals waiting out their futures in shrinking patches of trees.
The NFA had never really been built for this kind of fight. It’s a forestry agency, oriented around plantation management and timber production, not armed confrontations with well-connected encroachers. Every court loss, every withdrawal of guards, every cleared hectare seemed to confirm that the institution was outmatched.
By late 2025, the pressure was impossible to ignore. The National Anti-Wildlife Crime Coordination Task Force had met three times since June just to deal with Bugoma. At a judicial and security awareness meeting in Hoima City in November, coordinators reported that some 6,000 hectares had been encroached upon for logging, charcoal, and farming. It had become one of the most well-documented conservation crises in Uganda and nobody was doing quite enough about it.
President Museveni’s February directive was categorical. Evict all encroachers no exceptions, no compensation. Transfer management to UWA. Investigate the UPDF personnel implicated in charcoal burning. Begin upgrading the reserve to a National Park.
Then came Friday’s ceremony, and with it a noticeably different tone.
UWA Executive Director Dr James Musinguzi was not vague. “We are deploying personnel on the ground, using drones and aerial surveillance to monitor activities in the forest,” he said. “Illegal charcoal burning, timber cutting, and farming will stop immediately.”
Tourism Minister Tom Butime, who first raised the alarm with the President in October 2025, described the handover as a milestone and was equally blunt: all encroachers and illegal operators must leave the reserve now. Prime Minister Nabbanja added that she expected the ministry to begin the process of upgrading Bugoma to National Park status — a legal reclassification that would bring far stronger protections and, potentially, significant tourism revenue.
Nobody who has watched Bugoma for the past decade is celebrating just yet.
The fundamental legal disputes over the Hoima Sugar title, the MZ Agencies claimn and the exact location of the reserve boundaries are not resolved. Poverty in communities surrounding the forest hasn’t changed. The people who made money from charcoal burning and illegal logging have not been held to account.
In Nsozi village, Kyangwali sub-county, visitors who toured the forest earlier this year found places that had been dense, impenetrable jungle reduced to bare ground. Not thinned out bare. The trees are gone. No institutional handover brings them back overnight.
What UWA offers that the NFA couldn’t is an enforcement culture. Its rangers protect National Parks against poachers and encroachers every day. It has the legal framework, the armed personnel, and now the political backing. Whether that translates into something real in Bugoma depends on what happens over the coming weeks, not the coming years. The chainsaws don’t wait.
Chimpanzees are resilient, given the chance. Forest can regenerate, slowly, with enough time and protection. The Ugandan mangabey is still out there somewhere in what remains of the canopy.
What Bugoma is really asking now is a simple question, even if the answer is hard: Does Uganda actually mean it this time?
That answer won’t come in speeches. It will come in whether the stumps stop multiplying and whether, deep in what’s left of the forest, the chimpanzees still have room to call home.
