By Nelson Byaruhanga
Margret Atuhairwe, 64, collects water from a dugout hole on the banks of a seasonal river called Kamukule in Kigwera Southeast, Buliisa district. It is the water they use for cooking, bathing, and washing utensils at home. She has to fetch as many jerrycans as possible in less than an hour’s time because the brown running water from the Tilenga oil and gas central processing facility in Kasinyi village has been announced to have crossed two villages and will arrive next in her village at any time. Atuhairwe is aware that when it comes, she will have to wait for weeks to fetch water from the holes until the contaminated water dries up.
“The water is always dirty and smelly,” says her granddaughter Everce Katulinde, who is assisting her to carry the jerrycans back home to escape the flash floods. “When that water comes, they come with mosquitoes; we spend a lot of money buying drugs to treat our children of malaria, and it is expensive for me as a widow,” Margret says. She recalls when the floods came in November 2023 and the dirty, smelly water mixed with sand left her granddaughter’s tree nursery bed dead.
At the Tilenga Oil and Gas industrial area in Buliisa district being constructed by McDermott & SINOPEC for the French oil giant Total Energies to handle a combined 5.8 billion barrels of crude oil in 28 years, when it rains, it pours sorrow into the neighboring four villages of Kasinyi, Kirama, Kigwera Northwest, and Kigwera Southeast. Homes are submerged, people displaced, clean water sources contaminated, roads blocked, and properties washed away by the man-made floods from the industrial facility, which find their way down to Lake Albert.
In November 2023 Mr. Jackson Kigwabya’s eldest son was forced out of his matrimonial bed with his newly married wife on their first night as a couple when their house flooded during the middle of the night. Three of Jackson’s sons have since voluntarily migrated to the Kisansya trading center to escape the wrath of the Tilenga floods. “The floods from Kasinyi have made my sons abandon me; I am a lonely man as if I do not have children,” Jackson said. “I do not have even a latrine for my family now; my pit latrine was submerged, and the water carried all the waste and brought it inside my house. I sleep with my own feces,” he added.
A few meters away from Jackson’s home is a submerged community borehole. Children and women have to remove their clothes and remain half naked to walk through the flooded area in order to access the borehole and pump drinking water. “Our borehole these days pumps colored water; it is what we drink,” said Mr. Byarufu Ronny, who is escorting his grandchildren to collect drinking water from the borehole.
On April 11, 2023, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), a public research and advocacy organization that supports oil-affected communities in Uganda, wrote a letter to Total Energies highlighting fears that the water from the oil facility could contaminate Lake Albert and its potential to poison animals and people. AFIEGO requested the Uganda Ministry of Water and Environment to work with the Petroleum Authority Uganda (PAU) to test the water runoff from the Tilenga Area to determine the chemical content therein and the risks they pose to children, domestic animals, and Lake Albert.
In a report by the Independent Magazine in March 2023, Gloria Sebikari, the Petroleum Authority Uganda (PAU) Corporate Affairs Manager, disclosed that hydrological and flood modeling studies for the development of a suitable pond retention system were ongoing at the Tilenga oil facility located on the 318 hectares of land, while a flood management plan for the lifespan of the project was at the design stage.
Despite all the promises, in October 2025, communities neighboring the Tilenga CPF continued to flood, with the affected more than two thousand residents, including women and children, demanding monetary compensation for the disturbances and the construction of a 15-kilometer trench to direct the water from the oil facility down to Lake Albert and minimize the flooding of their homes.
A group of local citizen scientists who assert to have been educated by money from fishing activities on Lake Albert but preferred anonymity in our report because some work with oil and gas subcontractors say , the construction of a water runway to Lake Albert would mean sacrificing the life of the lake if the water is polluted. They are voluntarily conducting independent studies and tests on the chemical and physical compositions of the water samples collected from the floods this year at private laboratories in Kampala.
The group claims that preliminary findings indicate that the water contains metals and chemicals. “We are waiting for the repetition of heavy metal analysis according to the standards; we have to have duplicates of the sample, and then we officially publish our findings,” says the group leader. They believe the scientific facts from their studies on the water composition will be crucial to engage with the government on a permanent solution and compensation for the lake and the affected people. The Tilenga oil project will also construct a water abstraction system that will drain 159,700,000 cubic meters of water from Lake Albert during the Tilenga lifespan.
Under the conditions of the approval for the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment for the Tilenga Project and the certificate of operation, the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) policy provides for the emergence of substantive undesirable effects that were not contemplated during the issuance of the certificate of approval, and the developer’s persistent failure to address negative environmental and social impacts occasioned by the project as core cases for suspension/withdrawal/cancelation of the approval/certificate.
The citizen scientists believe the flooding of the oil facility is a project design problem as observed by the alleged lack of silt traps and flood/contour trenches around the huge pits that were dug to manage storm water, causing overflow to the surrounding areas and siltation downstream. They are demanding for the Tilenga project to undertake an ESIA certificate addendum. They also demand a detailed hazard risk assessment/study to be called for to abate some of what they believe are design issues.
