Dr Richard Leakey. Photo/FILE
By MURITHI MUTIGA mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Saturday, March 31 2012 at 22:30
Posted Saturday, March 31 2012 at 22:30
When news of a breakthrough in Kenya’s long search for oil was announced by President Kibaki last Monday, Dr Richard Leakey was elated but only mildly surprised.
Few Kenyans have been as alive to the wondrous possibilities that lie below the soils of Turkana than the veteran scientist.
His love affair with the arid north-western tip of the nation began quite by accident.
One day, in 1966, while flying to a site along the Omo River in Ethiopia, where they were excavating for fossils, the pilot was forced by bad weather to overfly Lake Turkana.
The budding palaeontologist noticed that there were sediments in the area to the East of the Lake which might be of historical interest.
He arranged to return by helicopter and, on landing there, he and his team of researchers realised there were strong signs that fossils and tools lay below.
He concluded it might be worth organising an excavation mission in the region.
Over the objections of his father, the noted palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who wanted them to concentrate their activities around the Omo River, Dr Leakey convinced the National Geographic Society to offer him a grant to carry out an exploratory expedition around Lake Turkana.
His team arrived in 1968 and, within a couple of years, they had unearthed a series of significant finds, including the skull of a Homo Erectus and an intact cranium from the same period.
Years of hard work culminated in one of the most important anthropological finds in history.
The “Turkana Boy”, as it came to be known, was the most complete early human skeleton ever found.
It was 1.5 million years old and drew worldwide attention, identifying Turkana as the cradle of mankind. The find, which was unearthed by Dr Leakey’s lead researcher Kamoya Kimeu, also sent a flood of students to the region and placed Kenya firmly on the world’s heritage map.
“The area around Turkana is probably one of the most important heritage sites for humanity,” Dr Leakey told the Sunday Nation last week.
“Every living human being today can trace his ancestry to the area very close to where they are drilling for oil. All languages that are spoken around the world are directly traceable to the ‘Turkana Boy’.”
Dr Leakey and his team had taken another important decision which helped pave the way to the oil find. From the moment they started excavation work the team found that the rock structure and the type of seismic activity that had taken place in the area meant there was a strong chance that oil and gas deposits lay underneath.
They made a proposal that further studies needed to be done and in the early 1970s a team of researchers from Duke University in the US and local geologists from the University of Nairobi carried out a geological and geophysical study of the larger Turkana area.
Their recommendation was that there were good grounds for optimism that large deposits of oil could be found in that area.
Although some exploration had taken place in the Turkana basin before, the conclusions of the study triggered major interest and the American firm Amoco and the Anglo-Dutch multi-national, Shell, came into the picture.
There were disappointments along the way and a rotating cast of explorers chasing the elusive black gold tried their luck until Tullow Oil apparently struck it lucky this year.
Dr Leakey praises the British firm’s approach to the search for oil saying they have been conscious of the region’s heritage value.
“Tullow agreed to work with National Museums of Kenya staff as they were doing their exploration work and so whenever the museum team found something of heritage value they flagged it and the Tullow people would work around it. It has been a very healthy partnership.”
He says he is hopeful but warns of the pitfalls ahead if the situation is not managed properly.
“I have always been very disappointed that very few government programmes have been aimed at the Turkana area and the resources allocated to the region have been very low. In the early days the road was good, there was a much smaller population and the Turkana were largely a very independent people with relatively large stocks of cattle. The problem of stock theft was still there and there was poverty but you did not have the problems you have today such as refugees in Kakuma and deaths from hunger.”
The former head of public service and director of the Kenya Wildlife Service says the key challenge in managing the oil wealth in future will be how the national government shows locals they have a stake in the process.
“The government needs to ring-fence a percentage of earnings to go to the provision of proper roads, schools and hospitals in the area. There needs to be a clear framework and everybody should know what the terms are. The local people must feel that this is our oil and it is Kenya’s oil.”
He says if he was in a position to advise the government he would caution against yielding to the temptation to sell “oil futures” to foreign companies and governments.
This is a process where one party pays upfront at today’s prices in return for taking the oil when it starts flowing at the end of the exploration process.
“I am hopeful. I think if it is confirmed there are significant quantities of oil – and I think that is the case – it gives us a chance to get the resources that can help address many of the fundamental challenges our people face. To accomplish that there must be total transparency.
Dr Leakey says the state should also improve security in a region where the Turkana have for years traded raids with their neighbours in Kenya, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda.
Managing the relationship with neighbouring states in a delicate frontier region will be worth watching.
In fact, one of the ironies of the exploration efforts in Turkana which culminated in the oil find is the original Omo River expedition had its roots in a sibling rivalry between the founding presidents of Kenya and Ethiopia.
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