Tanzania Sets Up Team to Negotiate Oil, Gas Contracts with Foreign Firms

Tanzania on Tuesday set up a team of negotiators to represent the country in discussing all natural gas and oil contracts with international firms, reported Daily News Tanzania.

The team would consist of 25 experts from different backgrounds to ensure that all the relevant issues for building a sustainable oil and gas economy are addressed, a statement issued by Institute of African Leadership Sustainable Development (UONGOZI) said.

"It is my hope that this programme will help to equip participants with the requisite skills and tact to be good negotiators for the benefit of our nation, not only now but for generations to come," Ambassador Ombeni Sefue, Chief Secretary, UONGOZI stated, reported Daily News Tanzania.

He added that negotiating oil and natural gas agreements with International Oil Companies (IOCs) is a challenge which governments of natural resource-rich countries from Africa must address.

“The IOCs can afford to bring with them the best technical, fiscal and legal capacities in the world, backed by wide and lengthy experiences in the field. So the first challenge we face is one of negotiating power asymmetry between the highly under-sourced African governments and the highly-resourced IOCs," he said.

The East African nation has witnessed discovery of large amounts of natural gas in its offshore fields. Tanzania’s current proven reserves stood at 55 trillion cubic feet (tcf).

Last month, Governor of the Bank of Tanzania (BoT), Prof Benno Ndulu, said Tanzania’s economic growth is expected to see a sharp acceleration in coming years, driven primarily by the natural gas sector. The Governor stated that the economy is projected to start accelerating at the rate of 15.3 percent annually within the next 12 years.