The President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni is set to leave for Moscow to join other African leaders for the second Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum.
The summit in St. Petersburg will run on Thursday and Friday after which the Ugandan leader will head to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, to inaugurate a hub for promoting Uganda’s tourism, trade, and investment potential in line with bolstering commercial diplomacy in Eastern Europe.
Uganda has, according to Foreign Affairs ministry, enjoyed warm historical ties with present-day Serbia from when it was part of former Yugoslavia that ethnic and nationalist wars disintegrated into seven independent states in the early 1990s.
Henry Okello-Oryem, the state minister for International Affairs, told this publication by telephone from London yesterday that Uganda will at the convention amplify Africa’s voice on global affairs while pursuing its bilateral interests with Russia.
Top on the agenda of an expected tête-à-tête between President Museveni and his host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, will be security and technology transfer for across-the-board innovations and agricultural modernisation.
Uganda’s other main interests in the bilateral cooperation with Moscow, according to Minister Okello-Oryem, are the “development of the oil industry, securing fertiliser access, and promoting trade and investment”.
Whereas Moscow has centuries-old expertise under its belt in oil and gas extraction and export, Kampala by contrast has spent the past decade-and-a-half skilling human resources, enacting laws, and establishing institutions in readiness for oil production planned to start in 2025.
A key supportive infrastructure that the country is grappling to put in place is a 60,000 barrels-per-day refinery in Hoima in mid-western Uganda.
The government first gave the deal to RT Global Resources of Rostec, a Russian arms manufacturer, but financial handicaps linked to the West’s sanctions over the Crimean annexation in 2014 reportedly hamstrung the arrangement from going ahead.
It fell apart in July 2016 and an American-Italian special vehicle christened Albertine Graben Energy Consortium (AGEC) snapped up the deal when Kampala dangled it to other suitors.
Russia, alongside other former Soviet countries, among them Belarus, are choice destinations for Uganda to train its military pilots or source military hardware spare parts.
In the latest symbol of strengthened ties, the government has hand-picked a Russian company to supply and install digital and trackable registration plates for all cars in the country, although the firm is yet to start the exercise after being found unprepared by the July 1 commencement date.
This week’s forum in St Petersburg follows the Russia–Africa summit held on “peace, security and development” in the seaside Sochi resort in October 2019.
