Met with Tullow! They’re down for assessment and want to collaborate! We’ll do a site visit next time Nomogaia folks are in Uganda! They’re most scared of managing expectations of public gain/benefit/enrichment, and rightly so, but at first glance it looks to me like they’re not sufficiently worried about how what the government does impacts their public image in the eyes of local communities. Aside from the military presence, Uganda’s tax code currently sends oil revenues straight to Kampala, leaving little or none for local communities. Tullow’s charity works are going to look awfully meager in the face of a ballooning GDP.

Things will get interesting tomorrow as Jonathan-the-driver-multilingual-interpreter-former-malaria-worker and I head out to Hoima district and Masindi, where oil drilling is ongoing (and also where Congolese Rwandan and Kenyan refugees have congregated along with internally displaced Northern Ugandans).