Kenya’s President William Ruto. [Photo by Wu Hao – Pool/Getty Images
A proposal to build an oil refinery on Tanzanian soil has strained relations between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, after Kenyan President William Ruto went public with the plan without first securing the blessing — or even the knowledge — of his Tanzanian counterpart, President Samia Suluhu Hassan.
Samia’s decision to air the grievance openly forced Ruto’s hand, compelling him to respond to what had become an uncomfortable public exchange between two neighbouring heads of state. Yet when Ruto finally spoke, he offered no explanation for the consultative failure. What he offered instead was a vision — expansive, pan-African, and carefully constructed to make Tanzania’s objection appear, at best, a misunderstanding.
“Allow me to explain our discussion on Tanga as a place of refinery. I have been informed that my announcement has irked you a little bit. If I had known, I would have announced its construction in Mombasa because the building of a refinery is a big opportunity for business, industrialization, petrochemical industries, fertilizer production, and plastics industries,” he said.
The implied message was pointed: Tanzania was not a victim of diplomatic negligence — it was the intended beneficiary of a generational investment. Ruto moved quickly to broaden the frame, presenting the refinery as the product of a regional consensus rather than a unilateral Kenyan initiative, with Rwanda, Uganda, and other East African states said to have already committed to participating.
“The good people of Tanzania are lucky that we are discussing how to build a refinery in Tanga. It is an investment the government of Kenya is willing to undertake, Uganda is willing to invest, and many other countries are ready to come on board,” he said.
Central to Ruto’s argument was infrastructure. Tanga’s coastal position and its short distance from Mombasa, where a refined-products pipeline already exists, made it, in his telling, the logistically obvious choice for processing crude pumped from Uganda’s interior before distribution across the wider region.
“From Tanga to Mombasa is a short distance, and since we already have a pipeline of refined product from Mombasa, we can use all our assets appropriately, transport crude from Uganda, refine it in Tanga, and distribute it across the region,” he said.
He then widened his argument to the continental level, casting the refinery as one front in a larger battle against an economic order that has long seen Africa export its natural wealth cheaply and buy it back expensively as finished goods — a cycle he insisted the region’s leaders were now resolved to break.
“It is not tenable anymore for us to export raw materials. We must be deliberate not to export jobs, not to export opportunities, but to create them here,” he said. “It makes absolutely no sense for us to export crude oil and then struggle to import finished products with challenges in global supply routes.”
The industrialisation argument, he stressed, was not Kenya’s alone but a shared conviction among the region’s leadership.
“Our discussion was about how to industrialize our region using our resources… It is my belief and that of the leaders in our region that whatever raw materials we have should be used for the industrialization of our region so that we can create wealth, jobs, and expand opportunities here,” he said.
Ruto ended his address by acknowledging Tanzania’s indispensable role in turning the plan into reality — a closing note that read as equal parts diplomatic repair and strategic flattery. But with Samia’s complaint still hanging in the air and no accounting for why Nairobi acted without consultation, the goodwill calculus between the two neighbours may take more than a refinery promise to fully restore.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah