The paradoxical and never-ending dispute between Kenya and Uganda over the tiny island of Migingo, in the middle of Lake Victoria, populated mainly by Kenyan citizens but just outside their country's territorial waters and inside Ugandan ones, is back on the agenda. For over 20 years, the two states have claimed ownership of the island, a rock on which almost a thousand people live, mostly engaged in fishing. 
Over the years, the business of fishing for perch and other lake fish has brought the two states to the brink of clashes between police forces and a diplomatic crisis, until, in 2009, Uganda agreed to draw up a report surveying residents and territorial waters, to put an end to the Kampala authorities' demands for “lace” to prevent Kenyans from paying foreigners residence and work permits. It was a decision that had given hope to Kenyans, who had come to lay down the Ugandan flag from that paradoxical rock in the middle of the world's second largest freshwater lake.
Now, sixteen years later, the Migingo community has petitioned Kenya and Uganda to publish the famous report, and human rights associations in Africa have raised the issue of the ‘acts of slavery’ to which Kenyan citizens are allegedly subjected by the Ugandan authorities.
It was in 2009 that Kenya and Uganda appointed a joint technical team to undertake a physical demarcation of the border with Lake Victoria, using the Kenyan Colony and Protectorate Order drawn up in 1926 and the Constitution of Independent Uganda as a basis for work.
But the work had come to a halt after a few weeks, when the engineers of the two nations. disagreed over technical issues. The Kenyans had then established that Migingo lies 510 metres inside the Kenyan border. Resolution never officially recognised by Uganda.
According to accounts of Migingo fishermen, until a few decades ago the island was inhabited by a single fisherman, whose trail has been lost.