At a hotel by the Nile, politicians and civil society representatives from oil producing regions are indignant about the activities of oil companies in their home areas. Entire villages have been uprooted to make way for oil firms to dig sand out of the ground for the oil roads. Millions of trees have been cut, with their proceeds not seen anywhere. As well, hundreds of thousands of people, they say, have been displaced without compensation. “What happened in Northern Upper Nile does not make sense,” said Gatkuoth Duop Kuich, a member of parliament from Jonglei and the chairperson of the Land and Natural Resources Committee in the Parliament of the autonomous Southern Sudan. “People were forced off their lands and everyone just watched.” The Oil War, as Kuich refers to the 21-year civil war that ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, taught the people that oil explorers value money more
