2024-01-09 06:15:11
Can we become an oil country in 2024? Worse, in five or ten years? In December 2023, the hottest year in history ended with a consensus among the world’s governments to “gradually abandon fossil fuels” at COP28 in Dubai. And yet around ten African countries are preparing to join the club of oil and gas exporters, including Uganda, Senegal and Niger.
In Uganda, the comparison with Norway, this distant European country, is on the lips of all decision-makers. Not for its polar cold or the majestic beauty of its fjords but for its management of the oil windfall: Oslo is often held up as a model for having devoted its oil revenues to the diversification of its economy, thus guaranteeing its wealth well beyond the ‘black gold. Today, the Nordic state has the third highest GDP per capita in the world (101,000 dollars, or 91,500 euros).
A waking dream for Uganda, one of the poorest countries on the planet ($1,163 GDP per capita), landlocked in the very chaotic Great Lakes Africa. Held with an iron fist since 1986 by Yoweri Museveni, this rural country with an extremely young population (75% under 30 years old) suffers from a glaring lack of access to education, health and even electricity, particularly in the countryside (less than 36%). Kampala certainly presents itself as a dynamic hub, with its party culture, its legendary traffic jams and its noisy swarms of motorcycle taxis, but the economy remains very informal and violently unequal.
The discovery of oil deposits from 2006 around Lake Albert in the west raised high hopes. After several delays, the country is now targeting the exploitation of around 1.4 billion barrels from two blocks by 2025: Tilenga, the largest, operated by the French TotalEnergies, and Kingfisher, entrusted to the Chinese Cnooc.
The offices of the petroleum department at the Ministry of Energy, in Entebbe, Uganda, October 25, 2023. BADRU KATUMBA FOR “THE WORLD”
A “climate bomb”
The project also arouses immense criticism, well beyond its borders. About a third of Tilenga’s wells are being dug in Murchison Falls, a national park home to lions, elephants, leopards and multiple species of birds. Kingfisher will extract oil from the waters of Lake Albert, where fishing communities live. Not to mention that all of these barrels, or almost all, will be exported via a giant oil pipeline crossing Uganda, then Tanzania, nearly 1,500 kilometers to the port of Tanga.
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