Hoima, Uganda – When Uganda discovered commercially viable oil reserves nearly two decades ago, Hoima district became the center of attention. Hotels sprang up almost overnight, land prices skyrocketed, and residents believed that prosperity was finally within reach. “People thought oil would transform our lives,” recalls John Mugisa, a hotel owner in Hoima town. “We were preparing for the boom.”
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.
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.