Posted on :Thursday , 9th December 2021

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is scheduled to visit Tanzania this weekend for an oil and gas conference and bilateral discussions with Tanzanian counterpart Samia Suluhu Hassan.

According to aides, President Museveni will deliver a keynote speech at a private-sector-organized conference on the 1,445-kilometer East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project's potential.

President Museveni's deputy press secretary, Farouk Kirunda, said that the Ugandan leader will travel to Tanzania for a three-day working visit beginning Saturday, where he will meet with Tanzanian President Suluhu to discuss the progress of the $3.5 billion EACOP project, which will connect Uganda's oil fields to Tanzania's port of Tanga.

In April of this year, the two countries signed the Host Government Agreement, Shareholder Agreement (for the pipeline firm), and Tariff Agreements, which are three major agreements that will kick off the building of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with Total and CNOOC.

But the project still faces financing blues after some European lenders walked away from requests to finance it.

The EACOP project is expected to create over 5,000 jobs directly and over 20,000 others indirectly.

Uganda recently secured five acres of land at Tanga in Tanzania to set up a business complex to monitor the country's expected oil cash inflow from petroleum exports.

The first oil drop from the Albertine Grabben belt is expected to start flowing in 2025 following the launch of project works of the $3.5 EACOP project in April.

The symposium, which began on Friday at the Julius Nyerere International Convention Centre in Dar es Salaam, is expected to raise private sector awareness of the legal, policy, and regulatory frameworks for oil and gas in Uganda and Tanzania, as well as create synergies and areas of cooperation between private sector companies in the two countries, according to an earlier statement by Tanzania's private sector foundation.

Private and public oil and gas industry stakeholders from Tanzania and Uganda, as well as private sector associations, legal firms, insurance firms, logistics providers, and national oil companies, will attend.

A symposium is a hybrid event that will bring together over 200 high-level private sector leaders from Uganda and Tanzania in person, with over 2,000 people watching the conversation online.