Uganda and Tanzania sign $3.5bn oil pipeline deal
- Posted on
- Comment
Tanzania and Uganda have signed an agreement allowing for the construction of a 1,445 km (898 miles) crude oil pipeline.The $3.5bn (£2.7m) project will connect Uganda’s oil fields to Tanzania’s port of Tanga.The signing ceremony was attended by the presidents of both countries.Oil reserves were found in Uganda in 2006 but production has been delayed partly by a lack of infrastructure including an export pipeline.A start date for construction has not yet been announced for what is set to become East Africa’s first major oil pipeline.But there are warnings the project could come at a huge cost to some Ugandan communities.
More than 12,000 families risk losing their land and livelihoods, according to a joint report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and Oxfam.Conservationists have also warned that ecosystems are at risk from the drilling in Uganda’s nature reserves.
French oil giant Total is leading the plans along with China’s CNOOC, and the governments of Uganda and Tanzania.Sunday’s ceremony comes days after Total, the majority shareholder in Uganda’s oil fields, said it had reached an agreement on the pipeline with Uganda’s government.About 80% of the pipeline will run through Tanzania and the project is expected to create more than 18,000 jobs for Tanzanians, Reuters news agency quotes government spokesman Hassan Abassi as saying.
-BBC
ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson
[email protected] An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.
View all posts by: Nana Kwesi Coomson
(Selorm) | 
(Nana Kwesi)