When you stand on the island of Rukwanzi at the heart of Lake Albert, your first thought, echoing perhaps the casual rhetoric of the region's oil men, is that you are at the edge of a new frontier.

But for its communities the lake is a centre, a point of connection and integration, the great body of water into which the White Nile flows, part of the vast rift valley that draws Africa's citizens into mutual dependency. What happens here matters to half a dozen neighbouring countries. But the lines being drawn now, as neat and straight as the borders on colonial maps, mark not sovereign territory, but exploration blocks for oil and gas companies.

A Minister threatens to evict 2,000 as big-wigs scramble for public land in oil region

Somewhere in Hoima district the small sub county of Kyangwali is home to one of the Albertine’s biggest oil fields — Kingfisher - said to be one of the largest oil wells in the basin with over 300 million barrels of oil. Unfortunately Kyangwali is also the site of growing land disputes, with powerful politicians and military officials scrambling to take possession of huge tracts of public land and evicting locals.

In September 2007, the UPDF allegedly opened fire on a Congolese ferry. But the army denies the allegation.
Five years since the killing of six Congolese, including a three-year-old child on Lake Albert, new information published today shows Heritage Oil and Gas, a company which was once the biggest operator in Uganda’s fledgling oil sector, played a key role in triggering the fatal UPDF operation which led to their deaths.