East African Business Week (Kampala)
Mikaili Sseppuya
26 October 2009
We took off from Hoima Town on a bright sunny Thursday morning and drove northwards for about an hour and a half headed for Kibiro down the escarpment of the Great Eastern Rift Valley at the shores of Lake Albert which lies on the DR Congo border. That was September 29.
We were on our way to oil wells in Kibiro-Butiba-Wanseko area one of the more picturesque hot springs about to turn an oil spring around Lake Albert. After a bumpy one and half hour bumpy lonely dusty road from Hoima Town the human settlements become fewer and savannah vegetation more evident.
Our land cruisers reflected two moving barges of dust as we slopped down the escapement marking, the magnificent rift valley far below with Lake Albert in the background.
At some point we met a tarmac portion which we were informed connected once-upon-a-time Butiaba Port which we could barely see on the far end of the Lake to Hoima. Only poles betray the submerged port that used to boom with booty from then Mobutu's kingdom. He died in the 1997 and his thief dom renamed DR Congo.
A senior geologist Dozith Abeinomugisha told us the barely viable remote blue hills over the lake was D. R. Congo about 40 kilometres away.
When we turned off the tarmarc road we rolled down a very steep and rough track with boulders the size of concrete blocks. Without a four wheel drive vehicle one could not even attempt to go down the slippery incline down the escapement.
Many of us chose to walk down the steep track -on on something you could hardly call a road. At the bottom were clusters of huts marking Kibiro Village which had several hundred villagers mostly fishermen.
Leaving the vehicles we trudged for a few hundred metres before we started going up a steep hill on the sides of which Abeinomugisha told us was the Sebugoro seep.
Climbing that incline was not a joke particularly if your shoes did not have gripping blocks. One lady from a neighbouring country found her shoes torn apart almost at the start of the incline The 'seep' was in the rocks and coloured black giving off a characteristic kerosene smell, the first sign that that liquid that has made men rich, fight and kill their environment. That is oil.
"This seep known as the Sebugoro sandstones was one of the early indicators of probability that there is oil in the area" Abeinomugisha said.
If going up had been difficult coming down was much more hazardous and some of us had to more or less make the journey sliding on our backsides.
We reached the hot springs which we were told had healing powers because of the chemical composition which brings therapy to the body. What a chance to treat our tired, sweat smelled bodies.
Abeinomugisha pointed out the potential of the hot spring to generate hydro power. The village looked at us like new species, though some went on with their household chores fishing, mending nets, which apparently is the centre of their lives.What with the heat, the dust and the smell of fish all of us, it was time to continue our journey. We drove back the steep incline towards Pakwach north west of River Nile in Northern Uganda.
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