Presidents rarely break ground on a $300 million project and then tell the crowd it is still not enough.
President Museveni did exactly that recently in Mpigi. The Kampala Storage Terminal will hold 320 million litres of petrol, diesel, jet fuel and kerosene. It will more than double national storage capacity and be completed within 24 months. Uganda gets through roughly 240 million litres a month.
So, the new tanks buy the country over a month of cover. The terminal is an essential step forward and part of Uganda’s ambition to become a regional petroleum hub. The President is right to want to go further. A
blocked port, a railway failure or a war far away can put an entire economy under pressure within two weeks. The past two years made that risk impossible to ignore. When conflict flared in the Middle East in early 2026, freight rates and premiums jumped.
Places that had built proper strategic stocks, locked in supply contracts and kept more than one corridor open managed better. Uganda was among them.
The IMF’s latest assessment credited the fuel import system introduced in 2024, under which UNOC sources product through Vitol, with helping to cushion the shock, and the relatively contained movement in domestic pump prices bore that out.
The Mpigi facility is one piece of a longer chain. A refinery planned for Hoima, a 211-kilometre products pipeline into the centre of the country, more capacity at Jinja, and further regional storage later.
Uganda is also on the eve of first oil. The crude, now called Pearl Sweet, will travel through the East African Crude Oil Pipeline to Tanga. The idea is straightforward. Build the infrastructure to receive, refine, store and move fuel whether the outside world is calm or not. The story does not stop at the Ugandan border.
The same infrastructure links landlocked producers to the Indian Ocean through Tanzania. The memorandum signed this year between Uganda, Tanzania and Vitol for an energy hub at Tanga reaches the same conclusion from the other end.
At its heart is a proposed bidirectional products pipeline between Tanga and Uganda, on a scale comparable to the 1,443-kilometre EACOP corridor. It would move refined fuel in either direction as demand requires.
Products refined in Uganda could flow to the coast for export, while fuel landed or refined at Tanga could move inland to Uganda and potentially onwards. Feasibility and engineering studies are due to be completed this year.
Fuel security in East Africa will be stronger when it is regional. A terminal in Mpigi is more valuable when it connects to a wider system of pipelines and ports. A hub at Tanga is only as useful as the hinterland’s ability to store what arrives.
Strategic storage is rarely glamorous. It attracts attention only when the alternative is queues at every filling station. Governments that built adequate tanks, secured contracts and diversified routes before the last crisis used to be called over-cautious. That description is now outdated.
“We are now moving slowly out of sleep,” President Museveni told the audience. With first oil not far away, a named crude, a refinery planned, a pipeline to the sea and one of the region’s largest storage terminals under construction, his insistence on going further and faster reflects the scale of ambition required.
The countries that will manage the next decade of energy shocks are the ones building tanks, ports, pipelines and partnerships before they are forced to. On the evidence of Namwabula, and of Tanga across the border, East Africa isn’t waiting for the next crisis.
Instead, it is getting on with building a more secure future. The writer is a Kampala based social commentator and Global Affairs
analystkyoojo77@gmail.com