East African Business Week

ARUSHA, TANZANIA-The confidentiality clause in the oil agreements signed by the Uganda government and the investors prohibits revealing of the collected data to the public, an official has said.
"It is not possible to reveal any data in the agreements the government signed with investors because there is a confidentiality clause," said Uganda's assistant commissioner-petroleum exploration and production in the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, Mr Honey Malinga.
"This is because the investors spent money to collect the data and after its collection it becomes property of the investors and in case the investor withdraws the project, it becomes property of the host government," Malinga told East African Business Week in an interview in Arusha, Tanzania.
Mr. Malinga was among the Ugandan participants who attended a regional seminar on Management of National Petroleum Data for Eastern Africa in Arusha, Tanzania.
Other participants were drawn from Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, Burundi, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique and Zambia.
MP in the Uganda have piled pressure on the speaker to summon parliament to scrutinize Oil agreements which the speaker has declined.
 The MPs argue that the agreement do not favour Uganda and suspect some powerful politicians may stand to benefit.
Malinga said the oil industry is relatively new in the region and still lacks human resources, financial capacity, legal frameworks and affected by poor policies.
"In Uganda and Tanzania, we have agreements, they compel a company to acquire data before production and start recovering the funds after starting production," he said. "If a company fails to produce oil, it means it will never recover that money, so if you avail their data to the public before production starts, it is disadvantageous to the investors," he explained.