With the additional troops, Amisom hopes to consolidate the hard-fought military gains it has made during in order to take control of the remaining half of Mogadishu under insurgent control. Uganda has already had to pay a bitter price for its participation in the Amisom operation when Al Shabaab staged terrorist attacks on Ugandan soil last July.
Saleh was, somewhat controversially, fingered as a potential culprit in the plundering of DRC mineral resources during the ill-fated Ugandan imbroglio in the Eastern DRC.
Conoco, Amoco, Chevron, and Phillips oil companies all held extensive oil exploration properties in Somalia under the Siaad Barre regime. By allowing his younger brother to involve himself in a somewhat risky and politically inflammable conflict, the Ugandan president runs the risk of providing ideological cannon fodder to Islamist forces opposed to the Amisom operation in the country.
Whether this is mere conjecture or not, does not matter. For forces locked in a life-and-death struggle for political and economic survival in Somalia, any piece of conjecture will do to denigrate, or undermine the legitimacy of the Amisom force.
And, by implication, the Transitional Federal Government TFG that is still hanging on by its fingernails in the blown-out, war-battered capital city Mogadishu. Regardless of this controversy, oil is clearly to be had in Somalia. On January 17 Africa Oil Canada announced that the company together with its partners, Range Resources and Lion Energy, concluded negotiations with the Puntland government. Keith Hill, president and CEO of Africa Oil, remains positive that the upcoming wells in the rift basins of Puntland hold the same potential as related basins in Yemen that have yielded upwards of 6 billion barrels of reserves.
