"Civil society concerned over oil pipeline"

Civil society organisations that are tracking developments in Uganda’s fledgling oil and gas industry have asked the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) to ensure transparency and accountability whenever citizens are appraising oil development projects. The community-based organisations under their umbrella body, the Civil Society Coalition on Oil and Gas (CSCO) made the call...while appraising the recent public hearings on the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project’s environmental and social impact assessment report. The EACOP, a US$3.55 billion project, is one of the major oil and gas infrastructure projects the Ugandan government alongside its partners including; the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) and the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC), Total E&P Uganda B.V, Tullow Oil Uganda Operations Pty Ltd and CNOOC Uganda Ltd are looking at building before commercialization of the country’s 1.4bn barrels of oil starts around 2022...

But civil society representatives some of whom attended the week-long public hearings accused the government agency, NEMA, of ignoring and skirting around critical issues that are supposed to be addressed during such public hearings. Under Ugandan laws and regulations, public hearings are organized to enable citizens submit their views to guide the environmental regulatory agency as it makes a decision on whether to issue an environmental certificate of approval or not to the project developer. “There are critical issues which we feel have not been addressed in these public hearings,” Onesmus Mugyenyi, the deputy executive director of the Advocates Coalition on Development and Environment, a Kampala-based public think tank...[said] Mugyenyi said: “The purpose of public hearings is to make sure that potential positive and negative impacts that are likely to arise are identified and where necessary mitigation measures are put in place to address negative impacts.” “When these public hearings are done, citizens provide their input, orally or even in written submissions but it is very rare to get feedback on whether the issues they have raised are considered important or not.”