Just kidding. That project is on hold for now. Rather pitifully, the oil refinery secured its final piece of financing the day before the riots. That deal fell through. . . something about a force majeure? We’ll get back there, though. Hopefully cabbies will be more willing drivers under new leadership.
Hi from Kampala, Uganda, instead! It looks like a big city where exotic birds and child laborers have replaced pigeons* (and NGOs/aid groups have replaced 50 percent of the storefronts).
Kampala has a lot going for it; Uganda at large is more complex. If censuses are to be believed, this place nearly doubled its population since 1994. During an HIV epidemic, no less. Population growth is attributed to refugee in-migration (from wars in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and to a dedicated rejection of family planning in rural areas. The high population growth, combined with a well-intentioned government effort to expand national parks and resettle semi-nomadic herding populations is some pretty fierce stress on land. Removing a bunch of fertile land from public use and converting it into an oil field, refinery and an electricity transmission line has, to put it lightly, increased the strain. That said, oil development could palpably increase Uganda’s GDP and foreign earnings, making moot the farmers’ land loss… as long as they can find alternative gainful employment elsewhere and all the oil revenue is responsibly deposited into government coffers and then distributed equitably to the benefit of the public.
That’s the gist of Nomogaia’s newest HRIA pilot.
An out-of-nowhere Irish company, Tullow, acquired thousands of acres of oil exploration licenses in Uganda over the past decade, which have recently proven quite promising. Tullow is already producing oil offshore of Ghana and has been fighting legal battles to retrieve its DRC licenses ever since the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo revoked them handed them over to cronies pre-election. It has operations elsewhere, but this is where the headlines lie.
So Tullow is experienced in ocean drilling and battling governments. This limited expertise isn’t serving them well in the fertile (ok, semi-arid) soils of western Uganda. There are legitimate environmental concerns associated with oil production in fragile ecosystems, many of which Tullow is managing very responsibly. The major human rights problem (at a glance) seems to be that they have outsourced their land acquisition process to the military. Reports (unconfirmed, as of yet!!) of torture, wrongful imprisonment and brutal beatings are bouncing down the halls of every major Ugandan Human Rights NGO office I’ve entered.
The catch is that Tullow seems to want to be/do good. But by obeying Ugandan law, they’re almost certain to violate universal human rights (including: property, freedom from wrongful arrest and torture, nondiscrimination, etc).
*Apologies to all who are offended by callous child labor jokes. I’m not at all blasé about child labor, and the fact that it’s ubiquitous is too depressing to write about with seriousness.
