KAMPALA Uganda – A foggy dawn is just giving way to daylight in an upscale suburb east of Kampala. Patience Apolot, a young accountant, joins the queue outside a mobile coffee booth for something once considered very rare in this east African nation: a morning cup of coffee.
LUSAKA ,Zambia-
BULIISA, Uganda—Baboons wander through shrub-lands that line the sides of newly built roads straddling Uganda’s wildlife reserves close to the shores of oil-rich Lake Albert.Across the border in Congo, magnificent lush green hilly countrysides stand out.If you’re lucky you can catch a glimpse of elephants too. Wildlife is abundant here, but such scenes might be no more in a few years, as oil companies embark on multi-billion projects to pump as much as 6 billion barrels of crude oil from Uganda’s biodiversity rich Albertine Rift Graben.
Diana Taremwa Karakire contributed to this article.
Over many years, regional conflicts in eastern and central Africa have driven a steady influx of refugees into Uganda, to the extent the country now hosts the largest refugee population in Africa and the fifth biggest in the world. As the climate crisis deepens, however, the nation’s focus has shifted to a different type of displacement: internal migrants forced to move due to landslides and floods.
Billions of investments into mining projects have breathed new life into Uganda’s once-neglected Karamoja region, creating thousands of jobs in mineral-rich heartlands near the Kenyan border. But the investment rush has also brought new problems, fueling environmental degradation, rights violations, and land grabbing, threatening livelihoods of millions of Indigenous Karamojong people.