My thoughts are with Eng. Perez Wamburu and the entire @SGR_Uganda team, this morning. It must be tough to work in such a political environment. And also the team at @mofpedU & @Citibank. But keep your heels dug in and deliver on your mandate. Find method in the madness!
We probably deserve another red card for that last post! But in all seriousness, congratulations to @Arsenal on winning the Premier League and a great run in the Champions League.
Looking forward to picking up the battle again with you next season.
If I were Dangote, sitting atop a 650,000 barrels-per-day refinery on the East African coast, I’d still find myself drawn to Uganda’s refinery project. Not as an afterthought, but as a serious strategic play.
The reason comes down to what Uganda actually offers.
Yes, the planned Ugandan refinery starts modestly- 60,000 bpd, and scaling to 120,000. But it sits right at the crude source. And surrounding it is already a constellation of infrastructure - an industrial park, a network of roads, an airport, and direct access to some of the fastest-growing landlocked markets on the continent: Uganda, Rwanda, eastern DRC, South Sudan, western Kenya, and beyond.
Uganda’s refinery isn’t just a ripe project; it’s an automatic door into one of the most underleveraged regional markets on the continent. Step inside, and you’re not just refining crude you’re planting a flag at the beating heart of East and Central African commerce. That kind of experience doesn’t just add value to a project like this, it unlocks it.
A coastal refinery does what coastal refineries do best; it serves export flows and maritime logistics with quiet efficiency. A Ugandan refinery does something different. It puts refined product close to where people actually live and consume, cutting through the expensive last-mile problem that has long plagued inland supply chains.
As emphasized by H.E. @KagutaMuseveni the Uganda refinery and the East Africa one aren’t rival bets. They’re two complimentary vantage points within the same regional energy system ; one anchored at the water’s edge, the other embedded deep in a hinterland where demand isn’t coming; it’s already here.
That’s how I’d see it, anyway.
But again, I’m not Dangote (and will never be) and he definitely knows things I don’t!
I don’t really understand the maths it takes to send humans behind the Moon and bring them back safely. And the more I sit with that, the more it genuinely messes with my head even tho my love for physics and my knowledge of physics is astounding to a point
Somebody had to work out a path where the Moon’s gravity is pulling you in, the Earth is pulling you back, and you’re moving just fast enough and not slow enough not to get trapped by either. They had to figure out the exact angle to come back into Earth’s atmosphere too. Too steep, you burn up. Too shallow, you bounce off and drift into space. And they had to get all of that right at the same time, for real people sitting in a small metal capsule about 400k kilometres away from home.
Nothing in that system is standing still.
The Moon is moving.
The Earth is moving.
Even the Sun is pulling on everything. And still, some people looked at all of that motion, all of that chaos, and turned it into numbers you can follow. Go here.
Adjust here.
Come back here.
And unlike nepa light, it infact works.
There’s also that moment in the journey where the crew passes behind the Moon. No contact with Earth. No signal. Just silence, with a massive rock blocking everything they’ve ever known. The only reason they can stay calm in that moment is because someone, somewhere, did the maths and proved they’ll come out the other side.
I don’t know what it feels like to trust something that much. To put your life in an equation when you’re that far away from everything.
But I do know this for sure, whatever that level of thinking is, whatever it takes to reach it, it might be one of the most extraordinary things human beings have ever done...
Increase your surface area for luck to hit you. go outside, try new restaurants, museums, events, take new route home, speak to people and ask questions.