Description
This book speaks and develops analyses from the vantage of point of the Uganda oil industry’s directly affected persons in western Uganda. It is focused on that small window between confirmed economic potential and actual extraction. That is, before the pipes begin to flow with oil. This window—which has been long for Uganda, with multiple pauses—is defined by anxieties and traumas of preparation, displacement, resettlement, compensation, waiting, speculation, violence, and several often, non-voiced traumas.
The researchers, who did their fieldwork in teams, explore key livelihood questions around food, land, compensation and resettlement. They also spotlight children education as schools in refinery-marked areas were closed before new ones being built; the gender question as only men signed the compensation cheques; the environment as rivers dried up, etcetera. Focused on violence and the traumas of development, this book questions the extent of state involvement in the lives of ordinary folks, who tend to be “the first ‘extractives’ from the earth,” but are simply unwanted disposable