Members of Parliament (MPs) in Uganda passed a bill on Tuesday allowing the state-owned oil company Uganda National Oil Company (Unoc) to source and supply oil to the domestic market.
If President Yoweri Museveni approves the bill, the country’s decades-long reliance on Kenyan companies for oil imports will end.
MPs who supported the bill said it would reduce fuel costs by cutting out middlemen and “fuel cartels that arbitrarily influence fuel pricing.”
Uganda’s Energy Minister Ruth Nankabirwa recently said that the country needed to stop importing oil through Kenyan companies as it “exposed Uganda to occasional supply vulnerabilities where Ugandan oil marketing companies were considered secondary whenever there were supply disruptions”.
Uganda imports more than 90% of its fuel through Kenya’s Mombasa port and the remainder through Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam port, according to Ms Nankabirwa.
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The country also seeks to shift more of its oil transportation via Tanzania.
