Also known in investment literature as Mbegani deep-sea port. A $10 billion port on Tanzania's coast has been announced, suspended, revived, denied and re-signed across three presidencies since 2013. This page groups those thirteen years into four announcement cycles and links every dated claim to the source that supports it. As of 20 September 2026, no independent source confirms that physical construction has begun.
Each cycle starts with an announcement, names someone who will pay for it, and ends a different way. The dates below are the boundaries of each cycle, not of the project.
Jakaya Kikwete and Xi Jinping announce it; China Merchants Group is to build the port and Oman's State General Reserve Fund to fund the industrial zone. John Magufuli's government stops the talks in 2019 over the investors' terms.
Samia Suluhu Hassan's government revives it under its own leadership. The named investors leave the negotiations first; the announcement of a 2023 start comes a month afterwards. The one item completed in this cycle is compensation to displaced landowners.
A Saudi acquisition is reported, denied three separate times within twelve days, and followed by three memoranda of understanding signed at once with Saudi, Chinese and Egyptian firms.
The Tanzania Ports Authority signs with Africa Global Logistics — the first counterparty that actually operates ports. Three announced start dates have since passed without independent confirmation that work began.
How this page labels each dated entry. Every entry below carries exactly one of these four labels, and no others.
The original structure was a Chinese builder, an Omani sovereign fund, a $10 billion headline figure and a promise to finish within three years. It ended six years later, with Tanzania's ports authority saying the investors' conditions would deny the country the benefit of its own port.
Announced. An initial agreement was signed at a ceremony witnessed by President Jakaya Kikwete and China's President Xi Jinping, with the port to be developed by China and Oman's State General Reserve Fund. China Merchants Group was named to lead the development. The cost was put at $10 billion — the figure the project has carried ever since.
Confirmed. Construction of the port development began in 2015 in the nominal sense: a groundbreaking. Kikwete said the port would be complete within three years, which would have meant 2018.
Announced. The scale being described at this point: Bagamoyo was to handle 20 million containers a year, 25 times the throughput of Dar es Salaam. The same report noted that 2,000 people had lost homes or farmland to the port and its industrial zone, and that the government had put total compensation at $20.9 million. Compensation was not finished until 2024, eight years later.
Announced. Deputy Minister for Trade, Industries and Investment Stella Manyanya told Parliament the port was expected to start operations between 2020 and 2021, in a report headlined as good progress. No source consulted for this page describes what physical works that progress consisted of. The project was stopped eighteen months later.
Confirmed. The project stopped. Under President John Magufuli, talks stalled because the investors' conditions were likely to deny Tanzania maximum benefit, according to the then TPA director general Deusdedit Kakoko. The conditions he named: freedom to set charges for cargo, tax exemptions on various goods, and compensation for losses incurred during implementation.
The second cycle dropped the 2013 financing structure and put the Tanzanian government in the lead. Note the order of the two 2022 entries below: the investors withdrew first, and the announcement of a 2023 start came a month later.
Announced. Samia Suluhu Hassan became president, and stated Tanzania's intent to revive the project.
Confirmed. Works and Transport minister Makame Mbarawa announced that the Chinese and Oman firms had dropped out of talks with the government. The same report put the project at $10 billion, or about 23 trillion Tanzanian shillings, and said other multinationals had shown interest.
Announced. A month after the withdrawal, TPA director general Plasduce Mbossa said construction would start in the next financial year — 2023 — without waiting for an investor: “Investors will join us on the way,” he told The Citizen. He also said the actual cost of building Bagamoyo was yet to be known and would be made public once preparations were complete. Construction did not start in 2023.
Confirmed. Deputy Minister for Transport David Kihenzile told Parliament that the government had completed compensating the landowners who relocated for the project. This is the only step in the whole chronology that is both confirmed and finished.
The shortest cycle here: reported, denied by the Tanzanian government, denied by the Saudi embassy, denied again by the ports authority, and superseded by three memoranda — all inside one month.
Announced. The Saudi Press Agency quoted Hassan Al-Huwaizi, chairman of the Federation of Saudi Chambers of Commerce, as saying Tanzania had granted a Saudi company ownership and operating rights over Bagamoyo, as part of Saudi Arabia's East Gateway project. Photographs of Tanzanian officials with Saudi investors circulated as a signing ceremony.
Denied. The same day, a senior government official told Daily News the information was false: the meeting concerned a joint business plan, not a transfer of ownership, and no formal agreement had been signed.
Denied. The Saudi embassy in Tanzania called the reports “entirely baseless and misleading” and stated that the Kingdom “has not engaged in any negotiations or agreements to acquire Bagamoyo Port.”
Denied. Briefing journalists in Dodoma, TPA director general Plasduce Mbossa said: “We have not signed any contract for the construction of Bagamoyo Port. What is currently being undertaken is a feasibility study review, following the suspension of the process years ago.” Several companies had expressed interest, he said, but what was being signed were memoranda of understanding, to open discussions (Daily News, 24 February 2025).
Confirmed. The day after that denial, the TPA signed memoranda of understanding with Chinese, Egyptian and Saudi companies. What is confirmed is that they were signed; no source consulted for this page establishes which of the three, if any, was binding or reflected a real commitment.
This is the first cycle to name a company that actually runs ports rather than a sovereign fund or a state builder — the reason this project became worth tracking again. It is also the cycle in which three start dates have been announced and none independently confirmed.
Announced. A senior government official said construction would begin in December, ending a decade of delays caused by government objections to the original contract.
Confirmed. The TPA signed a memorandum of understanding with Africa Global Logistics (AGL) Tanzania Ltd, a subsidiary of MSC, to design, build and operate three new berths at Bagamoyo — “three modern berths out of the 28 planned for the port” — plus two at Dar es Salaam.
Mbossa signed for the TPA and Philippe Labonne for AGL; the deal was reported in the trade press the following week. Building the three berths was to take three years.
What was signed is a memorandum of understanding, not a construction contract — the same instrument the TPA had described ten months earlier as a way to open discussions.
Announced. At the December signing Mbossa said: “We expect to begin construction of the three new berths at the Port of Bagamoyo early in January” (Daily News, 6 December 2025).
Confirmed. This contradicts both announcements above. Mbossa told Daily News that the first phase — dredging the port basin, the shipping access channel and the initial berths — was scheduled to start “next month”, meaning August 2026. The December 2025 and January 2026 start dates therefore passed without the works they announced.
Two figures in that interview do not match the December 2025 signing: Mbossa put the port's eventual capacity at 38 berths, against the 28 in the AGL memorandum, and the first phase at about 26 trillion shillings. Both are in the table below.
Unverified. Checked again on this date. No independent source confirms that dredging began in August 2026 as the TPA's own director general said it would. This entry has no link because it records the absence of a source, not a source: everything publicly available is either the November–December 2025 announcements or Mbossa's July 2026 statement, and nothing published in the first three quarters of 2026 reports work under way on the ground.
This is the pattern, without commentary. Each date in the first column links to the source that announced it.
| Announced | Work promised for | What followed |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Completion by 2018 | Project stopped in 2019 |
| Nov 2017 | Operations 2020–2021 | Did not happen |
| Sep 2022 | Construction in 2023 | Did not happen |
| Nov 2025 | December 2025 | Not independently confirmed |
| Dec 2025 | January 2026 | Contradicted by the TPA in July 2026 |
| Jul 2026 | August 2026 | Not independently confirmed |
Six announced dates across eleven years. The confirmed record over the same period consists of one groundbreaking ceremony, one completed compensation programme, and four signed memoranda of understanding.
Three different dollar totals, two first-phase budgets and two berth counts are in circulation at the same time. No source consulted reconciles any of them. This page reports the disagreement rather than choosing a number.
| What is counted | Figure | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Total cost, as first announced | $10 billion | The 2013 agreement; still the most repeated figure (The Citizen, 2019) |
| Total cost | TZS 23 trillion | Given as the shilling equivalent of $10bn (The Citizen, Aug 2022) |
| Total cost | $10 billion | “If completed, the $10 billion Bagamoyo port project”, reporting the AGL deal (The Maritime Executive, 21 Dec 2025) |
| Total cost | $2.1 billion | “The total investment earmarked for the full port development”, reporting the same deal eight days later (African Review, 29 Dec 2025) |
| Total cost | $11 billion | DredgeWire, June 2026 |
| First phase | TZS 22 billion (about $9.3m) | Berth foundations and access roads (Aphex) |
| First phase | About TZS 26 trillion | Dredging, access channel and initial berths (Daily News, Jul 2026) |
| Berths when complete | 28 | TPA director general at the AGL signing (Daily News, Dec 2025) |
| Berths when complete | 38 | The same official, eight months later (Daily News, Jul 2026) |
Where a source gives a figure in shillings, this page reports it in shillings and does not convert it at a later exchange rate.
Coverage often presents the port as a gateway to Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo over the existing TAZARA railway. There is no separately named “Bagamoyo corridor” scheme distinct from the port and that existing line: it appears as a connectivity argument, not as a funded programme with its own budget and timetable.
Announced. During President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's state visit, Tanzania and Egypt proposed transport projects linking Bagamoyo Port with the Kwala Industrial Park and the standard-gauge railway network, and were reported to be in the final stages of establishing a Dar es Salaam–Cairo multimodal logistics hub.
As described in that same report, the hub links the port of Dar es Salaam to Egypt's Sokhna and Safaga ports — not Bagamoyo. This page does not count it as a Bagamoyo commitment until a source ties it to Bagamoyo specifically.
Last substantive update: 20 September 2026. This page is reviewed at least every six months even when nothing has changed.