Uganda and Tanzania just won a major legal battle over an oil pipeline. The fight reveals much larger tensions about who gets to decide Africa’s energy future.
By Our Reporter
Here’s what happened: In late November 2025, the East African Court of Justice threw out a lawsuit that had been trying to stop a massive oil pipeline for five years. The project, called the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), would carry 210,000 barrels of Ugandan oil every day to a port in Tanzania.
The court’s reasoning was technical: the organisations that filed the lawsuit missed a 60-day deadline. But the case is about something much bigger than missed deadlines.
What is EACOP, and why does it matter?
EACOP is exactly what it sounds like: a pipeline that would move crude oil from Uganda’s oil fields to Tanzania’s coast, where it can be shipped to international markets. For Uganda and Tanzania, this isn’t just about oil. It’s about jobs, government revenue, and the kind of industrial development that both countries have been trying to achieve for decades.
Uganda has known about its oil reserves since the 2006 discovery, but getting that oil to market has been complicated. The country is landlocked. Building the infrastructure to export oil requires billions of dollars in investment, cooperation with neighbouring countries, and the kind of long-term planning that’s difficult when you’re one of the world’s poorest nations.
TotalEnergies (the French oil giant) and CNOOC (a Chinese state-owned company) are the main investors. The pipeline would be one of the longest heated oil pipelines in the world, stretching over 1,400 kilometres.
Why was there a lawsuit in the first place?
A group of civil society organisations sued to stop the project, arguing it would cause environmental damage and displace communities. These aren’t frivolous concerns. Big infrastructure projects, especially oil pipelines, have a history of causing real harm to people who live in their path.
But here’s where it gets complicated: the African Energy Chamber, an industry group that strongly supports oil and gas development in Africa, argues that these lawsuits are part of a pattern. They say Western-funded organisations are using African courts to block energy projects that African countries actually want to build.
NJ Ayuk, who runs the African Energy Chamber, puts it bluntly: development is being “delayed or derailed by external groups using African courts for ideological battles.”
Is this really happening elsewhere?
Yes. Similar lawsuits have targeted oil and gas projects across the continent.
In South Africa, court challenges have stopped or delayed offshore drilling projects by TotalEnergies and Shell. In Mozambique, what would be Africa’s biggest liquefied natural gas project faces lawsuits filed in the United States and France, not just in Mozambique itself.
The pattern looks like this: an African country approves an oil or gas project. International and local civil society groups file lawsuits challenging environmental permits or financing. The projects get delayed, sometimes for years. Investors get nervous. Costs go up.
Whether you think this is “heroic climate activism” or “foreign interference in African development” depends largely on where you sit.
What’s the argument for stopping these projects?
The environmental case is straightforward: burning fossil fuels causes climate change. Africa is already experiencing severe climate impacts, from droughts to floods, despite contributing very little to historical emissions. Building new oil and gas infrastructure locks in decades more fossil fuel use.
Environmental groups also point to local impacts. Pipelines can leak. Oil development can displace communities, pollute water sources, and destroy ecosystems. There are legitimate questions about whether affected communities truly consent to these projects or whether they’re steamrolled by governments and corporations.
And there’s a timing issue: the world is supposed to be transitioning away from fossil fuels. Building massive new oil infrastructure in 2025 looks, to many climate advocates, like moving in exactly the wrong direction.
What’s the argument for building them anyway?
This is where the development versus climate debate gets most heated.
African countries point out that they didn’t cause climate change. Europe and North America built their wealth on coal, oil, and gas. Now that Africa wants to use its own fossil fuel resources to build roads, power grids, and industries, wealthy countries are telling them not to.
The numbers are stark: hundreds of millions of Africans lack access to reliable electricity. Uganda’s per capita energy consumption is a tiny fraction of what people use in Europe or North America. For many African policymakers, being told to skip fossil fuels and jump straight to renewable energy feels like being told to stay poor.
They also note the hypocrisy: whilst advocating for Africa to abandon fossil fuels, European countries have been scrambling to secure new gas supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States continues to approve new oil and gas projects. Why should Africa be different?
There’s also scepticism about alternatives. Renewable energy requires upfront capital that many African countries don’t have. It requires grid infrastructure that doesn’t exist. It requires technology and expertise that must often be imported. Meanwhile, oil and gas offer immediate revenue.
So who’s right?
This is genuinely one of the hardest questions in global development and climate policy, and there isn’t a clean answer.
The climate science is clear: the world needs to rapidly reduce fossil fuel use to avoid catastrophic warming. Every new oil and gas project makes that harder.
But the development challenge is also real: telling poor countries they can’t use the same tools that made rich countries wealthy raises serious questions about fairness and sovereignty.
The uncomfortable truth is that these two realities exist simultaneously. Africa has legitimate development needs and legitimate grievances about double standards. And the world has a genuine climate emergency that affects everyone, including Africans.
What happens next?
With the lawsuit dismissed, EACOP can move forward. Uganda and Tanzania will proceed with construction. TotalEnergies and CNOOC will invest billions. Some communities will get jobs and economic opportunities. Others will be displaced or harmed.
But the broader fight isn’t over. More lawsuits targeting African energy projects are already in progress. More are likely to be filed. The organisations funding these legal challenges have substantial resources and aren’t going away.
For African governments, the EACOP ruling represents a win for what they see as sovereignty: the right to make their own development decisions without external interference.
For climate advocates, it represents a frustrating setback in the urgent effort to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure.
And for the people living in East Africa, who will experience both the benefits and costs of EACOP most directly, the outcome will depend on whether promises about jobs and development actually materialise, and whether environmental and social protections are genuinely enforced.
The reality is that energy infrastructure development in Africa has become a battleground where competing visions of development, climate action, and sovereignty collide. The EACOP ruling settles one legal case. It doesn’t resolve the deeper tensions that made that case necessary in the first place.
