This past week, leaders of some of the world’s wealthiest countries found themselves holding emergency talks over diesel.
The immediate concern was a rapidly tightening supply situation that had pushed prices of the commodity to a record £2 (equivalent to more than Sh340) a litre in Britain.
The situation became even more precarious when US President Donald Trump threatened to restrict American diesel exports, a decision that would have left European countries scrambling for alternative supplies.
The G7 countries eventually agreed to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil from their emergency reserves over four months, with a substantial quantity of diesel to be released within the first 20 days.
They also committed to maximising refinery production and avoiding restrictions on energy trade among themselves.
The intervention demonstrates why countries maintain strategic petroleum reserves in the first place. When normal supply is threatened, governments can draw on stocks accumulated earlier to cushion their economies as they wait for markets to adjust.
What should East Africa make of this unfolding diesel crisis? To be sure, it raised the question of the unhealthy dependency on imported petroleum products. At a deeper level, however, it puts the spotlight on one of the region’s most enduring energy paradoxes.
How can a region that has increasingly built its electricity systems around domestically produced energy remain so profoundly dependent on energy produced or refined elsewhere for its transportation?
In the six months to December 2025, for instance, nearly 79 per cent of electricity supplied to the national grid in Kenya came from renewable sources. Geothermal, hydropower, wind and solar energy now form the backbone of the country’s electricity system.
In Uganda, renewable sources – dominated by hydropower – accounted for 95.2 per cent of installed electricity capacity in a similar period.
Petroleum development plan
In fact, across the wider East African Community, renewable sources already accounted for more than 81 per cent of installed electricity capacity by June last year.
Yet, imported fossil fuel consumption in the entire region continued to soar. Kenya, for instance, consumed about 2.19 million tonnes of diesel in 2024, driven largely by demand in transport.
Indeed, the government’s own petroleum development plan notes that transport consumes about 72 per cent of all petroleum products imported into the country, with road transport accounting for the overwhelming share of that demand.
For much of the region, therefore, an intriguing energy contradiction is taking shape. On the one hand, we are steadily becoming more sovereign in the energy that powers our homes and work places, and which is largely renewable. On the other, we remain heavily dependent on imported fossil fuel to power our transport.
The vulnerability is particularly striking in Kenya because the country imports all its petroleum requirements in refined form.
In the year to June 2025 alone, some 9.76 million cubic metres of petroleum products entered the country, principally through infrastructure at the port of Mombasa.
This dependence has traditionally framed energy security around ensuring enough quantities of petroleum keep arriving.
That logic explains the investment in import terminals, pipelines, storage facilities and strategic stocks. It is also at the heart of the renewed interest in refining petroleum closer to home such as plans for a 700,000-barrel-per-day oil refining and industrial complex in the coastal region of Lamu.
Of course, strategic reserves cushion countries against temporary shocks, and local refining can reduce some forms of exposure and capture more value within the domestic economy.
But even then, reserves can only manage, rather than, eliminate dependency. A country that builds bigger tanks and fills them with high quality diesel, can still remain dependent on the global system that produces and trades the fuel.
Locally generated electricity
Similarly, refining crude closer to home changes where petroleum is processed but may not necessarily change where the bulk of the energy ultimately comes from.
The searching question for East Africa, therefore, is whether the region should continue treating electricity and transport as largely separate energy systems.
For decades, electricity policy has concentrated on generating enough power and extending the grid, while transport policy has largely assumed that vehicles will continue running on petroleum.
With the increasingly abundant, renewable and domestically generated electricity, that distinction is being stretched to the limit.
Every electric motorcycle, bus or vehicle that can realistically substitute imported petroleum with locally generated electricity, reduces the region’s carbon footprint. But that transition must now be seen through the lens of energy security. After all, clean, abundant and accessible energy will be benchmarks of a just transition.
Of course, the transition will not be as simple as replacing petrol stations with charging points. The overhaul will not spare any part of the electricity value chain. The grids would need to accommodate additional demand, charging infrastructure would have to expand dramatically, and vehicle costs, battery financing, public transport systems, taxation and the livelihoods built around the existing petroleum economy would all have to be reconsidered.
Nonetheless, the events in Europe must present East Africa with a reckoning. It may be time for us to ask just how much of the region’s economic life should continue to depend on a barrel of oil.
Dr Ageyo is the Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group – Uganda. He holds a PhD in media studies with a focus on science and environment communication
