Russia’s dodgy plan for a pipeline in Congo

FOR MORE than four decades the Republic of Congo, a central-African country of 6m people, has had only a single oil refinery, despite being a major producer of crude oil. That looks set to change by the end of December, when a new Chinese-built refinery is expected to start operations near the port city of Pointe-Noire. The refinery may reduce the petrostate’s reliance on expensive, imported, refined oil. But it will not solve the problem of getting the stuff to Brazzaville, the capital some 500km inland, without a long and bumpy journey by road.

That job, the government hopes, will soon be done by a new Russian-built pipeline, a project hashed out between Russia and the ruling Sassou Nguesso family (Denis, the patriarch, has been president with one brief interruption since 1979). Construction is supposed to begin as soon as the next few weeks. The government says that once it is finished, the pipeline will address chronic fuel shortages in the country and bring benefits for both businesses and ordinary Congolese.

Will it? Many are sceptical. The project appears to favour Russia. A Russian company will take a 90% stake in the pipeline and be paid a guaranteed fee for every barrel of fuel it transports for 25 years. Dmitry Islamov, Russia’s deputy energy minister, has said it will create a “sanctions-resistant petroleum products distribution channel” and secure Russia’s status as a regional “strategic energy-security partner”.

Given such comments, Congolese activists worry that the pipeline could be used to launder the revenue from sales of oil transported by Russia’s shadow fleet, which has been used to bypass Western sanctions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Given the corruption endemic in the Congolese state, any local benefit looks likely to accrue to a narrow elite. Ordinary people, by contrast, will probably not see much of the proceeds, reckons Andréa Ngombet, a Congolese pro-democracy activist.

All that is assuming the pipeline is built at all. Russia, though eager to portray itself as a development partner for African countries at a time of Western retrenchment, has a history of broken promises and stalled projects in the continent. In 2016 RT Global Resources, a Russian state-owned company, pulled out of a $4bn Ugandan oil-refinery project it had agreed the previous year. In Nigeria, a deal with Russia’s Lukoil in 2019 to set up new oil refineries has not produced tangible results. Nor has an agreement dating back to 2009 with Rosatom, which promised to build nuclear-power plants in the country.

The latest pipeline project may well suffer a similar fate. Given the economic pressures from Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, it seems unlikely that Russia could afford to build a pipeline in a relatively remote part of Africa, says Edward Verona, a former head of the Petroleum Advisory Forum in Moscow.

The set-up does not inspire confidence. Russian records show that bankruptcy proceedings were initiated in November against ZNGS Prometey LLC, the Russian company contracted to build and operate the pipeline, because of unpaid taxes. In addition, the pipeline may be vulnerable to Western sanctions. ZNGS Prometey is not under sanction. But reporting by iStories, a Russian news site in exile, suggests the pipeline project has past links with Russia’s foreign-development bank, which is under sanction, and which first signed a memorandum of understanding to build a pipeline in Congo in 2019. (ZNGS Prometey did not respond to a request for comment.)

All this suggests that for now, the main effect of the pipeline project may be to bolster Russia’s image. “Russia is trying to project itself as a major player in the global south and this appears to be part of that effort,” says Mr Verona. Meanwhile, most Congolese will continue to receive little benefit from their country’s oil wealth. ■