For decades, East Africa has watched its crude oil travel thousands of kilometres to be refined abroad, only to return as finished petroleum products at a premium. That may be about to change.
At the Africa We Build Summit in Nairobi, Kenyan President H.E. William Ruto, Ugandan President H.E. Yoweri Museveni, and Aliko Dangote, President and CEO of Dangote Industries Limited, sat on a presidential panel and outlined something that has never been done on the continent at this scale: a joint oil refinery at Tanga, on the Tanzanian coast, designed to serve five countries simultaneously.
“We are not discussing a refinery in Kenya or Uganda,” President Ruto said plainly on the panel. “We are discussing that we are going to have a joint refinery in Tanga — to benefit all of us.”
The facility, as described, would take in crude oil from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda. Finished petroleum products would then move through a short pipeline linking Tanga to Mombasa, feeding into an existing pipeline jointly owned by Kenya and Uganda. The logic, in President Ruto’s own words, is straightforward: “All our assets become profitable.”
The Infrastructure Already Exists
One of the most striking details to emerge from the conversation was how much of the necessary infrastructure is already in place. The Mombasa–Kampala pipeline, jointly owned by Kenya and Uganda, could carry refined product from Tanga to the wider region without requiring an entirely new build. A connecting link between Tanga and Mombasa is all that would bridge the gap.
President Museveni confirmed Uganda’s layered role in the project. The country would first develop a smaller domestic refinery — initially 60,000 barrels per day, scaling to 180,000 — to supply Uganda and nearby parts of Tanzania and Kenya where transport costs make local sourcing more efficient. Uganda’s surplus crude would then feed directly into Tanga.
“This is just from 40 percent of one of the five,” President Museveni said of Uganda’s oil contribution, making clear that his country’s stake in the refinery would grow as more oil fields come online. He was equally clear about ownership: “It cannot be owned by the coastal states only.”
Dangote’s Commitment
The clearest signal of commercial momentum came from Dangote himself. Having built what is scaling to become the world’s largest refinery in Nigeria — currently reaching 1.4 million barrels per day — he made a direct offer to the two presidents on stage.
“I can give commitment to the two presidents that are here,” Dangote said. “If they will support the refinery, we’ll build the identical one that we have in Nigeria.”
He framed the proposition not as generosity but as logic. “We have the raw material. We have crude. We have the market to buy the product. We have the capital to build it. Why would we pay?” The only missing ingredient, he argued, had always been consistent policy and political will.
Dangote also put the cost of inaction in sharp terms. He pointed to the volatility of imported petrochemicals — recalling how polypropylene prices swung from $900 to $3,000 in just 45 to 60 days — as evidence of how dangerously exposed African industries remain when they depend on global supply chains for basic inputs.
The Capital Question
No deal of this scale is built on political will alone. Samaila Zubairu, President and CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), used the panel to make the case that the financing does not need to come from outside the continent.
“Our research shows we have over $600 billion in pension funds, over $400 billion in insurance funds,” Mr. Zubairu said. “That is $1 trillion. And these are traditional long-term investors.”
His argument was that the barrier is not the money — it is the regulatory architecture around it. Pension fund trustees, he noted, are mandated to prioritise safety and liquidity, which pushes them toward short-term treasury bills rather than long-term productive investments. The solution, in his view, is to create credit enhancement and guarantee structures that make infrastructure projects as safe to pension funds as the instruments they currently favour.
“We need to go beyond 100 million, 1 billion, 2 billion,” Mr. Zubairu said. “We should look at 20, 30, 40, 50 billion for development.”
What Comes Next
The discussions, by the panellists’ own admission, are still early. No formal timelines, financing structures, or ownership percentages were publicly announced in Nairobi. But the signals were notable: two sitting heads of state, Africa’s wealthiest industrialist, and the continent’s leading infrastructure finance institution all publicly aligned on the same project, in the same room, at the same time.
“We have a lot of scientists,” President Museveni noted at one point, pushing back against any suggestion that Africa lacks the human capital to run what it builds. “There is nothing we cannot make.”
Whether the Tanga refinery becomes that proof of concept is the question East Africa now has to answer — together.