May Jeng writes: Roughly 120 miles northwest of the capital, Kampala, the asphalt road gives way to amber-colored soil and Uganda’s oil country begins. This remote region last captured the imagination of the West in the Victorian age, when gentlemen explorers arrived in search of the Nile’s source.
After the discovery of commercially viable oil reserves in 2006, companies including London-based Tullow, the French Total and the Chinese government-run CNOOC began drilling exploratory wells in the Lake Albert region. By 2009, the region’s reserves were estimated at 6.5 billion oil barrels, enough to potentially remake Uganda.
Nearly a decade after the discovery of oil, little of that promised infrastructure has been built. Meanwhile, exploratory drilling has ruined crops and killed off fish, eroding people’s livelihoods. Oil companies have made cash payouts to affected families, but that money has sometimes increased tensions.
Tullow spokesperson Conrad Nkutu said that the company expected to create as many as 150,000 jobs in the country.
The most dramatic consequence of the oil drilling so far has been the forcible eviction of 230 families last August to make way for a petroleum waste-management plant.
Villagers said they were not compensated for their lost property. The residents filed a lawsuit against the strongmen in November 2014, and the case is ongoing.
In Kaseta, a neighboring village of grass-thatched huts, the drilling has damaged the cassava crop and disturbed Lake Albert’s fish stock.
In the past few years, oil companies and the Ugandan government began compensating some of the farmers and fishermen who continue to tend to their cassavas and cast nets for tilapia in the lake.
The Ugandan government has yet to take meaningful steps to regulate the oil industry, according to George Boden, a campaigner with the watchdog group Global Witness. President Yoweri Museveni personally makes most of the decisions about the industry; he is widely believed to consider oil a means of supplying his personal coffers and maintaining power. Many of the production-sharing agreements, which outline how oil revenues will be distributed between the government and the companies, remain a secret. That’s unusual even by regional standards, which tend to favor oil companies.
Conservationists now worry that Murchison has no defense against the advances of oil companies: Already, drilling has commenced on park grounds. They point to neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where the government is considering redrawing the boundaries of Virunga National Park in order to accommodate the oil company SOCO International’s proposed exploration.
The discovery of oil in other African nations over the last half-century has largely failed to bring development. Nigeria, Angola and Equatorial Guinea have all been afflicted with the so-called “resource curse.” No longer dependent on taxes to stay solvent, governments became less accountable to their citizens.
