Shillings & Cents

MTN UGANDA CUTS QUARTERLY DIV TO SH4 AS OPERATING PRESSURES MOUNT

2026-11-05T08:15:51.095+03:00

MTN Uganda has declared a third-quarter dividend of Sh4 per share, amounting to Sh89.6 billion, as slowing revenue growth, rising operating costs and an aggressive network expansion programme put pressure on the telecommunications company's cash flows.

The dividend brings cumulative distributions for the first nine months of 2026 to Sh21.25 per share, compared with Sh20.50 over the corresponding period last year, an increase of 3.7 per cent.

Shareholders on the company's register at the December 1 book closure will receive payments on December 18, subject to withholding tax.

The lower quarterly payout reflects management's decision to preserve financial flexibility while maintaining shareholder distributions equivalent to 83.3 per cent of nine-month profits, above its 75 per cent dividend policy.

Chief Executive Officer Sylvia Mulinge said the board had recommended a lower quarterly dividend to align payments with near-term cash generation.

MTN Uganda's nine-month performance highlights

Indicator	9M 2026	Change YoY
Total revenue	Sh2.88tn	+8.5%
Data revenue	Sh860.6bn	+12.8%
Voice revenue	Sh964.1bn	+1.6%
Fintech revenue	Sh902.8bn	+11.6%
EBITDA	Sh1.47tn	+3.0%
EBITDA margin	51.1%	-2.8 pp
Profit after tax	Sh571.2bn	+21.2%
Capital expenditure (ex-leases)	Sh397.7bn	+32.6%
Operating cash flow	Sh429.7bn	-10.2%
Total subscribers	26.4m	+12.5%
Nine-month dividends/share	Sh21.25	+3.7%
Q3 dividend/share	Sh4.00	—

Source: MTN Uganda unaudited results, nine months ended September 30, 2026.

Profit growth masks underlying pressures

MTN's profit after tax increased 21.2 per cent to Sh571.2 billion from Sh471.2 billion last year.

However, the headline increase conceals a less impressive underlying performance.

The company benefited from the non-recurrence of a Sh111 billion tax settlement recorded in 2025. Excluding that expense, profit actually declined 1.9 per cent.

Operating profit increased just 0.4 per cent, while EBITDA grew three per cent. In the third quarter alone, after-tax profit declined marginally to Sh203.8 billion.

More concerning is the slowdown in revenue growth.

Although nine-month service revenue increased 8.5 per cent to Sh2.84 trillion, third-quarter growth moderated to 6.7 per cent.

Data revenue growth slowed sharply from 17.5 per cent in the second quarter to 7.8 per cent in the third.

MTN partly attributes this to unauthorised public Wi-Fi operators reselling unlimited data packages, against whom regulatory enforcement commenced in October.

Voice revenue, meanwhile, increased only 1.6 per cent as traditional calling services continued losing ground to internet-based communication.

Mobile money remains the growth engine

The brighter development was MTN's financial technology business.

Fintech revenue increased 11.6 per cent to Sh902.8 billion, with third-quarter growth accelerating to 13.3 per cent.

Active fintech users increased to 15.5 million, while transaction values rose 18.3 per cent to Sh166.6 trillion.

Advanced financial services, including payments and lending, recorded 26.2 per cent revenue growth.

As previous assessments have suggested, MTN is progressively transforming from a traditional telecommunications operator into a digital financial services and data business.

Data and fintech now contribute 62 per cent of service revenue and accounted for 86 per cent of its growth during the period.

Fintech revenue is rapidly approaching voice revenue, underlining the strategic importance of MTN's proposed separation of its mobile money business, which remains under regulatory review.

Expansion comes at a price

MTN's capital expenditure excluding leases increased 32.6 per cent to Sh397.7 billion.

The company deployed 255 new network sites, extended fibre coverage beyond 40,000 kilometres and increased 4G population coverage to 94 per cent.

However, operating expenses rose 14.6 per cent, significantly faster than revenue.

Consequently, EBITDA margins narrowed from 53.9 to 51.1 per cent.

Operating cash flow declined 10.2 per cent to Sh429.7 billion, while investing activities consumed Sh503.6 billion.

In effect, investment spending exceeded operating cash generation during the period.

What next for shareholders?

Management now expects full-year service revenue growth below its medium-term guidance, with EBITDA margins settling around 50 per cent.

For shareholders, MTN presents competing realities: a commanding market position and expanding digital businesses against slowing growth, rising costs and considerable investment requirements.

The Sh4 dividend illustrates that even profitable companies must balance shareholder expectations against the cash required to finance future growth.

The critical test will be whether today's substantial network investments translate into stronger earnings and cash generation, allowing MTN to sustain its historically generous shareholder distributions.

RWANDA'S FORMULA ONE COUP: EXECUTION IS OUR LESSON

2026-11-03T07:50:02.445+03:00

On October 13, Formula One announced a ten-year agreement to bring the African Grand Prix to Rwanda in the early 2030s. A circuit will rise in Bugesera, near the new international airport, returning Formula One to Africa for the first time since 1993.

We need to stop thinking our southern neighbor is punching above its weight.

It is an audacious coup, but hardly an isolated one. Rwanda has taken the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) strategy to another level. More importantly, it is systematically branding itself as a premium destination.

Consider the mountain gorillas. Uganda charges foreign visitors $800 for a tracking permit; Rwanda charges $1,500. It is not that Rwanda has better gorillas. It has positioned the experience as an exclusive product, supported by luxury hotel operators...

Then there is Kwita Izina, the annual gorilla-naming ceremony. Rwanda has turned a conservation activity into an international event attracting celebrities, conservationists and media attention. That is deliberate brand building.

The Kigali Convention Centre is another masterstroke. Its illuminated dome dominates the capital's skyline and may yet become to Kigali what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, the Sydney Opera House to Sydney or the Burj Al Arab to Dubai.

"Sustainable branding has four components: awareness, association, experience and loyalty...

First, people must know you exist. Then they must associate your country with something desirable. When they visit, their experience must validate the promise. Satisfied visitors return and recommend you to others.

Rwanda has pursued each step. Its Visit Rwanda partnerships with international sports clubs create awareness. Gorillas, luxury hotels, clean streets and an imposing conference centre build associations. Investment in hospitality, transport and service delivery is intended to turn those expectations into positive experiences.

The smaller moves matter too. Rwanda offers visas on arrival to travellers of all nationalities. RwandAir expands international connections. Conferences and sporting events draw influential visitors who might never otherwise have visited Kigali.

In 2025, Rwanda hosted 165 international and regional meetings and events, attracting more than 61,000 delegates and generating $94.7 million in MICE revenues.

Formula One takes this strategy to another level.

Think of the private jets, executives, celebrities and wealthy spectators arriving for a Grand Prix weekend. Suddenly, the scale of the new Bugesera airport makes sense. But the airport is not being built for a three-day race, nor is Formula One an end in itself.

The real prize is investment.

Investors often discover opportunities while visiting a country as tourists or conference delegates. Familiarity reduces perceived risk; conversations become relationships, and relationships can become investments. On October 22, Rwanda announced a partnership with Raffles Family Office to seek private investment linked to aviation, hospitality, property and the Grand Prix development. The money is not yet in the bank, but the intention is unmistakable.

Of course, Rwanda attracts criticism over political freedoms and its involvement in eastern Congo. Such concerns are serious. Yet negative headlines alone do not determine visitor numbers. Miami, one of the most violent cities in the world, attracts at least 20 million tourists annually. Visitors judge a destination by a wider range of considerations.

The lesson for Uganda

Certainly not that we need a Formula One race of our own.

Uganda already has a strategy: the tenfold-growth ambition to expand the economy to $500 billion by 2040, underpinned by Agro-industrialisation, Tourism, Mineral development and Science, Technology and Innovation — the ATMS agenda.

The source of the Nile, gorillas, the Rwenzoris and our wildlife give us ample material with which to build a world-class destination.

What Rwanda demonstrates, however, is that strategy without execution is merely aspiration...

You cannot grow an economy tenfold by 2040 while taking twenty years to complete projects – dams, roads, railways, that should take five. Every delayed airport, road, industrial park or tourism facility means years of forgone revenue, jobs, exports and investment.

Rwanda's achievement is the coordination of many apparently separate initiatives into one mutually reinforcing programme, pursued with urgency and consistency.

Uganda does not need another grand strategy. We need deadlines that mean something, institutions that coordinate and officials accountable for delivery.

The Formula One cars will race around Bugesera for a few days each year. Rwanda is playing a much longer game.

Our lesson is simple: the road map is already there. We must start reaching its destinations.

FROM CANNED FISH TO DOLLAR EARNINGS

2026-10-27T07:59:00.586+03:00

In the late 1980s, donor-supplied canned chicken curry and fish helped feed pupils in schools across Uganda, then emerging from years of conflict. Agricultural production had been disrupted and the country needed assistance to recover.

Around 1990, the supplies were withdrawn. I remember the announcement almost provoking a riot at my school in western Uganda. We had become so accustomed to Groot and mackerel that we could hardly imagine school meals without them.

Younger Ugandans may wonder what I am talking about. But the lesson endures: emergency assistance can quietly become an entitlement.

Fast-forward to today's shilling, which has breached the psychological Shs4,000-to-the-dollar barrier. Some commentators point to diminishing dollar inflows following USAID's closure and restrictions on NGOs. Their prescription? Re-ingratiate ourselves with donors so the dollars return.

Here is an unpopular opinion: painful as declining aid will be in the short term, it could ultimately do Uganda considerable good...

Certainly, aid has saved lives, supported education and sustained essential services. Its sudden withdrawal threatens real suffering. But perhaps we should ask not how to restore our dependence, but how to outgrow it.

While presented as benevolence, aid is also an instrument of influence. Donor governments pursue humanitarian objectives, but also political, economic and security interests.

Following the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, the World Bank suspended new financing approvals, citing concerns about discrimination, before resuming in 2025 after safeguards were agreed. The United States withdrew Uganda's preferential trade access under AGOA. Whatever one's position on the legislation or donors' concerns, the economic leverage was unmistakable.

Earlier structural-adjustment programmes linked financing to privatisation and liberalisation. Foreign assistance has supported domestic policy advocacy, including initiatives surrounding the Domestic Violence Act, although this was not necessarily formal aid conditionality. Security cooperation also influences donor relations. He who pays the piper can influence the tune.

"One understands the grumbling about aid cuts, especially from sections of the urban elite who have benefited handsomely from the aid economy. Donor-funded organisations, consultancies, workshops and professional jobs have sustained a comfortable urban class.

Kampala's sprawling suburbs and imposing upcountry mansions, many occupied mainly during festivities, are proof enough...

We need to look beyond the comfort of a relatively small, entitled elite towards spreading the benefits of economic recovery to the majority. At last count, 64 percent of Ugandan households engage in agriculture. Raising their productivity and incomes must be central to development.

But critics say Uganda lacks the resources. Really?

Electronic-money transactions reached Shs366 trillion in 2025, up from Shs286 trillion in 2024, exceeding Uganda's annual economic output of approximately Shs250 trillion. Growth that seems to be far from plateauing. Turnover is not investable capital; the same shilling circulates repeatedly. Still, it reveals the scale of domestic financial activity and signals the possibilities.

The challenge is aggregating more of that activity into savings and productive investment. NSSF has almost Shs33 trillion in assets. SACCOs, pension funds, unit trusts and insurers can mobilise fragmented savings into substantial capital pools, provided projects are commercially viable and savers protected.

"We cannot tax ourselves into prosperity. We must produce ourselves into prosperity...

Coffee shows what a sustained production strategy can accomplish. From approximately 4.2 million 60-kilogram bags in 2015/16, output more than doubled to eight million by 2020/21. Recent annual exports have likewise exceeded eight million bags, earning billions of dollars.

At that level Uganda is approaching genuine industrial scale. Consider Nestlé, which says it buys over 13 million 60-kilogram bags, from more than 20 countries. Our annual crop is already equivalent to roughly three-fifths of that global giant's purchases.

With a clear understanding of the value chain—from cultivation, grading and trading to roasting, soluble coffee, packaging, branding and retail—we can deliberately build Ugandan enterprises that capture more value from every cup.

Rather than remain primarily a supplier of anonymous beans, why not develop roasting and processing capacity where commercially competitive, nurture Ugandan brands and negotiate better access to global consumers? We cannot dictate world coffee prices, but we can take greater control of our coffee's destiny...

Dairy offers another example. Uganda's milk production doubled from 2.7 billion litres in 2020 to 5.4 billion in 2024, while dairy exports rose substantially.

Why not replicate such efforts in commercial goat production through better breeding, animal health and market access? Fish farming and processing can expand earnings while protecting our lakes. Intellectual property—software, music, film, publishing and technology—can earn foreign exchange without shipping containers overseas.

All this demands better roads, electricity, storage, affordable finance, extension services and predictable taxes. Rather than seeking another $100 million in donor assistance, what would it take to generate another $100 million in annual exports?

Yet the greatest obstacle may not be economic. It may be political.

A vibrant private sector creates alternative centres of wealth and influence. Successful entrepreneurs, financial institutions and business associations will demand accountability and sometimes disagree with government. For political elites suspicious of independent power centres, that requires a leap of faith.

"Real prosperity will require the intellectual flexibility to let economic influence flourish beyond political control...

Declining aid guarantees none of these reforms. Government could simply borrow more, raise taxes or slash services.

But the opportunity is to shift our national conversation from donor money towards domestic capital, higher production and exports. I remember the uproar over our disappearing canned fish. We survived without that menu.

Real independence is not merely having our flag and anthem. It is having the capacity to pay our bills, finance production and determine our economic future. Perhaps the greatest favour our development partners can do us is help us reach the point where we no longer need their generosity.

WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE: THE PRICE OF DEFENDING THE SHILLING

2026-10-20T16:07:22.345+03:00

Contrary to the impression the chattering masses might create, the Bank of Uganda’s decision to raise its Central Bank Rate (CBR) to 12 per cent is neither shocking nor unprecedented. We have been here before, and history offers a lesson: the way out is fiscal discipline, not populist concessions that postpone the pain and make the eventual adjustment more expensive.

Inflation, caused when demand outstrips supply, is not just a number. It erodes purchasing power, discourages productive investment and can reward speculation over production.

Uganda introduced the CBR in July 2011 as part of its shift towards inflation targeting. Inflation was surging and the shilling was weakening. The central bank raised the rate from 13 per cent to 23 per cent by November, as inflation reached around 30 per cent, levels last experienced in 1992.

The CBR influences how commercial banks price loans, alongside their funding costs, operating expenses and assessment of borrower risk. When the CBR rises, borrowing generally becomes more expensive. Businesses pay more for working capital and investment finance, while households face higher loan costs. The intention is to moderate spending and credit growth, ease inflationary pressure and help stabilise the currency.

The rate subsequently fell as conditions improved. It was cut during the Covid-19 pandemic to support activity, then held at 9.75 per cent from October 2024 until this latest increase. On October 14, 2026, the Bank of Uganda raised it by 2.25 percentage points, citing the weakening shilling, rising oil prices and the risk of imported inflation.

The familiar squeeze

Uganda needs dollars for fuel, machinery, medicines, industrial inputs and consumer goods. Higher international oil prices increase the import bill, while depreciation means importers need more shillings to buy the same quantity of dollars. Transport, manufacturing, agriculture and distribution become more expensive, with costs passed on to consumers.

Foreign-exchange inflows also face headwinds. Reduced development financing has disrupted NGO programmes, employment and procurement. The precise amount of foreign exchange lost through funding withdrawals and the suspension of civil society organisations remains unclear, but fewer grant-funded dollars circulating through local salaries and suppliers can weaken economic activity.

Higher interest rates may moderate credit growth and import demand, encourage investment in shilling assets and signal a commitment to price stability. But they cannot manufacture dollars...

There is another possible consequence worth watching: government borrowing costs. If the rate increase helps slow the shilling’s depreciation, investors may find shilling-denominated government securities more attractive. If the pressure on the currency persists, government may have to offer higher returns to attract sufficient demand for its bonds.

A rise in bond yields is therefore possible, although not automatic. Existing bonds have fixed coupon rates; their market prices and yields adjust as demand changes. New issues may need to offer more competitive returns. Higher yields could attract investors towards shilling assets and support demand for the currency, but the effect depends on confidence, inflation expectations and the availability of foreign exchange. It also means government could pay more to borrow.

Kenya's fuel-subsidy lesson

Kenya offers a warning about shielding consumers from every increase in fuel prices. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, international oil prices surged. Kenya subsidised fuel to cushion households and businesses, but the subsidy bill grew and delayed payments to oil marketers contributed to supply shortages.

When Kenya removed its petrol subsidy in September 2022, petrol prices rose by about 13 per cent in a month, with diesel and kerosene also becoming more expensive. The adjustment was painful, illustrating the difficulty of withdrawing support after consumers have become accustomed to artificially restrained prices...

The lesson is not that governments should abandon households to global price shocks. It is that suppressing price signals for too long accumulates fiscal costs and can make the eventual adjustment more abrupt. Gradual, transparent price movements give households and businesses time to adapt. Targeted support for the most vulnerable is preferable to an open-ended subsidy for everyone.

Resist the populist temptation

Uganda should be wary of proposals to remove taxes on fuel simply to bring down pump prices. Fuel taxes finance public services and infrastructure. Removing them without replacing the revenue or cutting expenditure widens the fiscal deficit. Government must then borrow more, cut spending elsewhere or accept a larger financing gap.

More borrowing can compete with businesses for credit and put pressure on interest rates, undermining the central bank’s efforts. Cheaper fuel may also encourage consumption of an imported product when foreign exchange is already under pressure.

Relief should be targeted, affordable and transparent. Protecting vulnerable households is not the same as subsidising fuel consumption for everyone.

Discipline is the way through

Government must prioritise expenditure, improve revenue collection and manage borrowing carefully. The private sector must improve efficiency and expand exports. Uganda needs to earn more dollars through coffee, tourism, minerals, manufacturing and other productive activities.

We have been here before. The way through is to maintain fiscal discipline long enough for imbalances to ease, rather than trade long-term stability for short-term applause.

Ugandans deserve relief from rising costs. But relief that leaves the country with less revenue, more debt and a larger foreign-exchange bill may simply make tomorrow’s adjustment more painful.

The shilling will not be defended by subsidising imported consumption. It will be defended by living within our means, earning more foreign exchange and resisting the temptation to postpone difficult decisions.

THE GASHUMBA-KAYANJA FEUD: PERHAPS CHRISTIANITY NEEDS THIS RECKONING

2026-10-18T12:56:34.617+03:00

The most remarkable thing about Frank Gashumba's Shs500 million challenge to Uganda's miracle-working pastors is not the money. It is how quickly a question about healing became a confrontation over religious authority.

Last week, the outspoken social commentator challenged pastors, prophets and apostles who claim miraculous healing powers to accompany him to a hospital and demonstrate those powers on critically ill patients. He initially offered Shs200 million before raising the stakes to Shs500 million.

Gashumba did not initially name any particular pastor. Nevertheless, the backlash was swift, most notably from Pastor Robert Kayanja of Miracle Centre Cathedral, who publicly warned Gashumba of dire consequences, including death. Gashumba's family subsequently accused the pastor of extending curses to four generations of their descendants.

"What began as a challenge to substantiate extraordinary claims has degenerated into an ugly exchange involving spouses and children...

Beneath the noise lies an opportunity to examine Christianity, particularly the relationship between believers, pastors and God.

Perhaps this controversy is precisely what Ugandan Christianity needs.

Christians must distinguish faith in God from faith in those who claim to represent Him. Pastors are human beings, subject to the same weaknesses and failings as everyone else. Their calling, eloquence, wealth, popularity or ability to attract large congregations does not confer infallibility or prove divine approval.

Christianity has grappled with false prophets and religious opportunists since its earliest days. Jesus warned in Matthew 7:15 against false prophets who disguise themselves as sheep but are inwardly ravenous wolves, saying believers would recognise them by their fruits.

The implication is clear:

"Christians have a responsibility to scrutinise their religious leaders, not surrender their judgment to them...

The Apostle Paul reinforced this principle in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, urging believers to test everything and hold on to what is good. Questioning a pastor is not necessarily questioning God; discernment may be an expression of genuine faith.

This distinction seems to have been lost in the present controversy.

Gashumba says his criticism concerns people he considers fraudulent religious leaders, not God or Christianity. Pastor Kayanja maintains that the miracles associated with his ministry are genuine and come from God. His son has also emphasised that pastors themselves do not heal; only Jesus does.

That is an important theological distinction. If the power belongs to God, no pastor should feel personally threatened by questions about its exercise.

Gashumba's challenge nevertheless has limitations. Faith cannot be reduced to a laboratory experiment, and God cannot be summoned to perform miracles for a cash reward. Nor should seriously ill patients become props in a public spectacle...

But claims of miraculous healing, particularly where desperate people are encouraged to part with money or abandon medical treatment, should not be beyond reasonable scrutiny. There is a world of difference between believing that God can perform miracles and accepting that everyone who claims to perform them is telling the truth.

History offers a powerful lesson. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the sale and promotion of indulgences, through which believers were offered remission of punishment for sins in exchange for payments. His Ninety-Five Theses helped ignite the Protestant Reformation, challenging entrenched authority and transforming the relationship between believers, Scripture and religious institutions.

The irony should not escape us. Some Protestant traditions that emerged from a rebellion against abuses of religious authority now face similar questions about money, power and accountability.

Where medieval Christians encountered indulgences, today's believers sometimes encounter promises of breakthroughs, deliverance, healing and prosperity tied to financial contributions. The language has changed; the temptation to commercialise people's relationship with God has not.

This is not to suggest that all pastors are charlatans or that churches should not receive financial support. Many religious organisations provide valuable education, healthcare, counselling and humanitarian assistance. The Kayanja ministry, for example, points to its humanitarian activities and says it maintains financial records subject to tax-authority scrutiny.

Such contributions deserve acknowledgement. However, good works do not place any institution beyond legitimate questioning.

Jesus himself drove merchants and money changers from the temple when commercial activity corrupted its sacred purpose. Christianity has never been comfortable with reducing God's blessings to merchandise.

The controversy also raises questions about how religious leaders respond to criticism. In Luke 6:28, Jesus instructed his followers to bless those who curse them and pray for those who mistreat them.

It is telling, therefore, that some pastors responded to Gashumba by cursing him and invoking death or misfortune. Even allowing for the emotions generated by his provocations, such responses seem difficult to reconcile with Christ's teachings on forgiveness and love. A pastor's moral authority is tested most clearly when challenged, not when addressing a receptive congregation.

In some ministries, the pastor's word becomes indistinguishable from God's word. Questioning the pastor is portrayed as rebellion against God, while loyalty to the leader becomes a measure of spiritual commitment.

This creates fertile ground for manipulation, encouraging believers to outsource their judgment, financial decisions and even medical choices to religious authorities. Christianity is fundamentally about a personal relationship with God, not unquestioning dependence on a spiritual intermediary. Pastors should guide and empower believers, not make them permanently dependent on a leader.

Perhaps the lasting value of Gashumba's intervention will have little to do with whether anybody collects his Shs500 million. It may instead lie in prompting ordinary Christians to ask:

What exactly do I believe, and why? Does my pastor's teaching agree with Scripture? Am I giving out of conviction or fear? Does my faith make me more compassionate, responsible and independent, or increasingly dependent on another human being?

These questions do not weaken Christianity. They can strengthen it.

Ugandan Christianity may be approaching its own moment of reflection. This need not produce another schism. It could produce a more discerning congregation, more accountable religious leadership and a renewed emphasis on Christ's teachings rather than the personalities of individual pastors.

Ultimately, the greatest danger to Christianity is not Frank Gashumba or anyone else who questions religious leaders. It is the possibility that believers have become so attached to their pastors that they can no longer distinguish criticism of a man from an attack on God.

"God does not need protection from legitimate questions. Nor should a pastor's reputation become the foundation upon which anyone builds their faith....

If this controversy reminds Christians to put their faith in God rather than in those who claim to speak for Him, Gashumba will have performed a valuable public service.

And he will not have needed to perform a single miracle.

SHS4000 TO THE DOLLAR: THE WARNING WE HEARD, THE LESSONS WE IGNORED

2026-10-15T11:35:36.611+03:00

Uganda's exchange-rate debate has a long memory, even if economic policy sometimes appears to have a short one. Every time the shilling comes under pressure, the country revisits familiar arguments: the strength of the US dollar, speculative activity, government spending, central bank intervention and the cost of defending the currency.

Yet the exchange rate keeps moving. From around Shs2,000 to the dollar in the early 2010s, to Shs3,000 in 2015, and now beyond Shs4,000 in October 2026, the direction of travel tells a story about an economy whose appetite for foreign exchange has repeatedly outstripped its ability to earn it.

A review of the exchange-rate debate over the years, reveals a recurring lesson: monetary policy can manage the pace of depreciation, but a lasting solution depends on the productive capacity of the economy.

The warning signs were there

In 2011, the shilling came under intense pressure, provoking complaints from importers and calls for government intervention. The debate was already about more than the price of the dollar. It was about whether the authorities could defend a particular exchange rate when the economy was not generating sufficient foreign currency to sustain it.

In March 2015, when the dollar crossed Shs3,000, this column published “The Shilling Collapse Is Our Fault, Not the Dollar's”. The argument was not that international developments were irrelevant. The US Federal Reserve was moving towards tighter monetary policy, the dollar was strengthening globally, and commodity prices were under pressure.

But Uganda also had domestic weaknesses. Its export earnings were vulnerable to commodity-price fluctuations, while demand for imported fuel, machinery, manufactured goods and other products continued to consume foreign exchange.

The warning was that attempting to hold the dollar at Shs2,000 without the economic fundamentals to support that rate would be futile. The exchange rate could be managed, but not indefinitely divorced from the country's capacity to earn dollars.

Adam Mugume's warning: Act before inflation takes hold

An especially revealing contribution to this debate came in October 2015, when Adam Mugume, then Bank of Uganda director of research, explained the central bank's thinking on depreciation and inflation.

In an interview published by Business Vision on October 12, under the headline “Uganda Bracing Itself for More Inflation”, Mugume explained that the central bank had tightened monetary policy in anticipation of inflationary pressure. The concerns included a deteriorating balance of payments, the prospect of tighter US monetary policy and weakening foreign-exchange inflows.

The interview highlighted pressures across foreign direct investment, workers' remittances, exports and tourism, alongside rising imports. Depreciation would increase the domestic cost of imported goods and eventually feed into inflation. Waiting until inflation had surged would make it more difficult and expensive to contain.

The follow-up discussion in this column's October 2015 archive illustrates the enduring policy dilemma. Higher interest rates can support the shilling and restrain inflation, but they can also make borrowing more expensive, slow investment and constrain economic growth.

Mugume's warning remains relevant. The Bank of Uganda can influence liquidity, expectations and the pace of depreciation, but it cannot determine the country's underlying supply of foreign exchange. That depends on exports, services, investment, remittances and other inflows, set against the economy's demand for dollars.

Depreciation is not a straight line

The subsequent history of the shilling demonstrates why individual exchange-rate milestones should not be mistaken for a permanent trend.

In 2022, the dollar approached Shs4,000 as the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates aggressively to combat inflation. Higher yields on dollar assets encouraged global investors to favour the US currency, putting pressure on emerging-market currencies, including the shilling.

The shilling subsequently recovered some ground. In 2024, stronger foreign-exchange inflows, including those associated with coffee exports, helped support the currency.

These recoveries matter. They demonstrate that exchange rates respond to changing supply and demand conditions and that depreciation is not necessarily a one-way journey.

But temporary appreciation does not automatically mean that the structural problem has been resolved. A good coffee season, a surge in capital inflows or improved investor sentiment can strengthen the shilling without fundamentally changing Uganda's dependence on imported goods and external financing.

From coffee to gold: Uganda's export transformation

The story of the shilling is not one of economic stagnation. Uganda has made meaningful progress in expanding its export earnings and diversifying the range of goods and services it sells abroad.

The historical record in this column's Uganda exports archive documents the expansion of the export basket beyond traditional agricultural commodities. Fish, flowers, cement, manufactured products, electricity and regional trade have created additional sources of foreign exchange.

The transformation has continued. In “When Coffee Ruled the Uganda Shilling”, published in April 2026, this column examined the emergence of gold as Uganda's leading export earner. Coffee receipts were estimated at about $2.5 billion in 2025, while gold earnings reached approximately $6.4 billion.

Official data also illustrate the scale of the expansion. In the first eleven months of financial year 2025/26, merchandise export receipts reached $14.47 billion, up 34.4 per cent from $10.76 billion in the corresponding period a year earlier. The growth was driven principally by coffee and gold. See the Ministry of Finance's March 2026 economic performance report.

This is significant progress. In the past, the timing of the coffee harvest could have a pronounced effect on the supply of dollars in the domestic market. Gold, alongside other agricultural and non-agricultural exports, has broadened the sources of foreign exchange and altered the seasonal pattern of inflows.

It would therefore be misleading to explain the shilling's depreciation simply by claiming that Uganda is not exporting enough or that nothing has changed in the productive economy.

Diversification, however, does not eliminate vulnerability. Gold and coffee prices fluctuate, and export receipts do not necessarily translate into an equivalent increase in dollars available in the domestic market at the moment importers need them. The timing of repatriation, the foreign-exchange requirements of businesses and the movement of capital all influence the exchange rate.

There is also a new concentration risk. Gold's growing importance means that Uganda is more exposed to developments in that market. The destination of exports matters, too: a concentration of gold shipments in particular markets can leave receipts vulnerable to changes in trading arrangements and demand.

The broader discussion in this column's Uganda gold archive is relevant to the currency debate. Gold can provide a powerful source of foreign exchange, but the durability of that benefit depends on the value retained locally, the industry's structure and how the proceeds are used.

Uganda has made progress in earning more dollars. The question is whether those earnings are keeping pace with the economy's total demand for foreign exchange.

The trade deficit: Where the dollars go

The merchandise trade balance provides part of the answer. It measures the difference between the value of goods Uganda exports and the value of goods it imports. When imports exceed exports, the country must finance the gap through other foreign-exchange inflows, such as services earnings, remittances, investment, borrowing or the use of reserves.

Uganda's problem is that import demand can grow just as rapidly as export earnings, sometimes faster. In June 2026, merchandise imports rose by 33.2 per cent year-on-year to $1.88 billion, while exports increased by 11 per cent to $1.28 billion. The monthly merchandise trade deficit consequently widened to approximately $598 million. The figures appear in the Ministry of Finance's July 2026 economic performance report.

The import bill reflects more than consumer demand. Uganda imports petroleum products, machinery, vehicles, chemicals, industrial inputs and equipment needed to expand productive capacity. Some of these imports are essential to future growth and export production. Treating every import as a problem would therefore be a mistake.

The challenge is to ensure that the productive capacity created by these imports eventually generates sufficient additional income, including foreign exchange, to justify the expenditure. Machinery that enables a manufacturer to export more can strengthen the economy's external position over time. An import that produces no corresponding increase in future earning capacity can leave the country more dependent on fresh foreign-exchange inflows.

The merchandise trade balance is not, however, the same as the current-account balance. The latter also includes trade in services, primary income and transfers. Uganda may earn more from exports while paying more for freight, insurance, technical services and income accruing to foreign investors. These outflows help explain why rising merchandise export receipts do not necessarily translate into an equivalent improvement in the country's overall external position.

The IMF's 2026 Article IV assessment of Uganda highlighted the continuing current-account deficit despite strong coffee and gold exports. Investment-related imports, gold imports and a wider services-account deficit were among the pressures.

The distinction matters when explaining the shilling. The exchange rate responds not just to the value of goods crossing Uganda's borders but to the country's entire flow of foreign-currency receipts and payments, alongside capital movements and market expectations.

Uganda has made progress on exports, but the benefits are being offset, at least in part, by a substantial import bill and other external payments. The policy task is not simply to export more, but to improve the net foreign-exchange contribution of economic growth.

Why Shs4,000 now?

The move beyond Shs4,000 should not be interpreted as proof that Uganda's export strategy has failed. Rather, it demonstrates that export growth and currency stability are related but not interchangeable.

A country can earn more dollars than ever before and still experience depreciation if its demand for dollars rises faster, if its other external payments increase, or if investors shift their portfolios towards foreign currencies.

The immediate pressures include international oil prices, geopolitical uncertainty, demand for imports and the timing of foreign-exchange inflows. The longer-term issue is whether Uganda can convert its expanding export base into a sufficiently strong and dependable net supply of foreign exchange.

The shilling traded around Shs3,604 to the dollar in March 2026. By October, commercial bank quotations had crossed Shs4,000. The Daily Monitor reported the record low on October 5.

On October 14, the Bank of Uganda raised its Central Bank Rate by 2.25 percentage points, from 9.75 to 12 per cent, in response to mounting inflation and exchange-rate risks.

Higher interest rates can make shilling-denominated investments more attractive, restrain demand and help contain inflation expectations. If government bond yields rise in response to the new policy rate and market conditions, the additional return could attract demand for shillings and moderate depreciation.

However, this outcome is not guaranteed. Higher borrowing costs can discourage investment, increase the government's debt-servicing burden and constrain private-sector expansion. Nor can monetary tightening create export earnings overnight.

Who pays for a weaker shilling?

Depreciation redistributes purchasing power. Importers pay more for dollar-priced goods, and consumers face higher prices for fuel, medicines, machinery and other essentials. Businesses with dollar-denominated debts face higher repayment costs in shilling terms.

Exporters, tourism operators and recipients of remittances may receive more shillings for every dollar earned. Investors with foreign-currency assets can also benefit from the translation effect when those assets are valued in shillings.

But the benefits are not uniform. An exporter that depends on imported fertiliser, fuel, packaging or machinery may find that rising input costs erode the advantage of a weaker currency.

The deeper question is whether Uganda is becoming better at earning foreign exchange. Coffee and gold have become important sources of export receipts, while tourism and remittances remain significant. Oil production offers further possibilities.

Yet a country cannot sustainably finance an expanding import bill through occasional commodity booms, external borrowing or the sale of foreign reserves.

The real defence of the shilling

The debate has repeatedly returned to the same choices: intervene or let the market work; raise interest rates or protect affordable credit; defend purchasing power today or preserve the capacity to invest for tomorrow.

These are genuine policy trade-offs. The Bank of Uganda can manage liquidity, anchor inflation expectations and respond to disorderly movements in the currency market. It cannot manufacture an unlimited supply of dollars.

Government must complement monetary policy with fiscal discipline, predictable investment rules and productive public expenditure. Businesses must invest in productivity and exports rather than depend indefinitely on preferential access to foreign exchange. Farmers and manufacturers need better infrastructure, reliable energy and affordable finance to compete internationally.

Uganda must also capture more value from what it produces. Processed and branded coffee, agricultural manufacturing, tourism, mineral beneficiation and other tradable services offer opportunities to earn more from each dollar of foreign exchange generated.

Shs4,000 should therefore be treated as a price signal, not automatically as either a national catastrophe or an achievement. It tells us that, under prevailing conditions, demand for foreign exchange is exceeding supply at the previous price.

The lesson from the warnings of 2011, the debate in 2015 and the subsequent recoveries is that defending the shilling cannot be the responsibility of monetary policy alone.

Uganda has expanded and diversified its exports. That progress should be recognised. But the next challenge is to ensure that export growth, domestic production and the wider balance of payments improve fast enough to meet the country's rising demand for foreign exchange.

The strongest defence of the shilling is an economy that earns more dollars, creates more value from its exports and reduces its dependence on imports that it could competitively produce at home.

The dollar may rise or fall. The more important question is whether Uganda will finally address the economic fundamentals that turn every new exchange-rate milestone into another national debate.

THE SHILLING HAS CROSSED 4K, WHAT NOW?

2026-10-13T07:38:19.620+03:00

There are some numbers in an economy that are more than numbers. In Uganda Shs4,000 to the dollar is one of them.

For years, Ugandans watched the exchange rate move around Shs3,500, then Shs3,700, occasionally threatening Shs4,000. Now the psychological barrier has been breached. Last week, the shilling crossed Shs4,000, from about Shs3,604 in March.

So what is happening—and where do we go from here?

There is a useful historical lesson here.

In March 2015, when the dollar first broke through Shs3,000, I wrote in this column that “the shilling collapse is our fault, not the dollar’s.”

The dollar’s global strength mattered. The US Federal Reserve was tightening after years of extraordinary monetary stimulus. But global currency movements were only part of Uganda’s problem.

Coffee exports had fallen by almost a fifth because of drought. Donor inflows had not fully recovered. Meanwhile, demand for imported goods and fuel was growing.

In other words, our supply of dollars was weakening just as our appetite for dollars was increasing.

That sounds remarkably familiar today.

"The immediate explanation for today’s depreciation is straightforward. Manufacturers, energy companies and other importers are buying more dollars. Some businesses are bringing forward foreign-currency purchases ahead of the end-of-year import season. Higher global oil prices are adding pressure...

Oil prices have risen sharply amid the conflict involving Iran and the wider Middle East, raising fears of disruption to supplies and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

For Uganda, which imports virtually all its petroleum products, this matters twice. We need more dollars to buy the same fuel, while higher fuel costs feed into transport and production costs throughout the economy.

There is also evidence of offshore investors trimming Ugandan debt holdings or buying dollars to hedge those positions.

But underneath all this is the same basic equation: the exchange rate is a price. It reflects the supply of dollars coming into Uganda against demand for dollars going out.

And our demand has grown considerably.

We import fuel, machinery, pharmaceuticals, vehicles, electronics and industrial inputs. We also have foreign debt obligations and a private sector increasingly integrated into global supply chains.

"The question is therefore not simply whether Uganda is earning more dollars. It is whether we are earning them fast enough...

In the late 1990s, you could predict the shilling by looking at the coffee calendar. September was coffee season. Exporters brought dollars into the country, converted them into shillings to pay farmers and meet local costs, and the shilling strengthened.

Coffee was so important that the currency almost danced to its harvest cycle.

But Uganda is no longer that economy.

In the late 1990s, coffee accounted for roughly 58 percent of exports. Today it remains a major source of foreign exchange, but gold has become an even larger export earner. Tourism, remittances, regional trade and other exports have diversified our dollar earnings.

The old coffee clock has not disappeared because coffee is unimportant. It has disappeared because the economy has become much bigger and more complicated.

Coffee earnings in July were 18.2 percent below the previous year, while August shipments fell 13.6 percent in volume and 10.3 percent in value. At the same time, dollar demand from energy, manufacturing and other importers remains strong.

The seasonal pattern is still there. It is simply being overwhelmed.

The lesson from 2015 remains valid.

The Bank of Uganda can smooth excessive volatility, manage liquidity and use reserves when necessary. But it cannot permanently manufacture dollars.

Trying to defend an artificially strong shilling simply requires the central bank to continually sell dollars. Eventually, reserves run down and the market forces the adjustment anyway—potentially more violently.

The answer cannot be to defend a particular number forever.

Did the Sovereignty Bill contribute?

It would be wrong to say the Protection of Sovereignty Bill caused the shilling to cross Shs4,000. There is no evidence for such a simple causal relationship.

But legislation affecting foreign capital does have economic consequences.

When the original bill was before Parliament, Bank of Uganda Governor Michael Atingi-Ego warned that restrictions could discourage foreign investment, portfolio capital and remittances. The legislation eventually passed was substantially amended, with legitimate financial flows protected.

So the final law should not be blamed for today’s depreciation.

"But investors watch more than the final wording. They watch how laws are conceived, debated and implemented. For someone deciding whether to invest $10 million in Uganda for ten years, predictability matters.

That is the confidence channel through which politics eventually becomes economics...

There are winners too

Uganda is predominantly a net importer, so a weaker shilling means higher prices for fuel, machinery, pharmaceuticals, electronics and consumer goods.

But the exporter sees the same exchange rate differently. A coffee farmer, gold exporter, tourism operator or company earning dollars gets more shillings for every dollar.

Consider the Ugandan waiting for a diaspora relative to send $100 for Christmas. At Shs3,600 it bought Shs360,000. At Shs4,000, it buys Shs400,000.

There are also less obvious beneficiaries.

NSSF’s record 22.53 percent interest rate for 2025/26 was driven primarily by strong investment performance, particularly regional equities. But currency movements were part of the story. The Fund invests in assets denominated in regional currencies, and a weaker shilling can increase the value of those assets when translated back into shillings.

Some of the millions celebrating the record NSSF return are therefore, indirectly, beneficiaries of the same currency movement making imported goods more expensive.

The real danger is persistent depreciation that feeds inflation, erodes purchasing power and changes expectations.

The lesson for us remains that there are no shortcuts.

"Uganda cannot permanently protect itself from currency movements by leaning on the central bank. The answer is to produce more, export more and add more value...

A decade later, our export base is more diversified. Coffee is a much bigger earner in absolute terms, gold has emerged as a major source of foreign exchange, tourism and remittances remain important, and oil is approaching commercial production.

But we have also become a much bigger consumer and importer.

That is why Shs4,000 should be treated as a price signal, not a crisis. It is telling us that Uganda’s demand for the rest of the world is, for now, growing faster than its capacity to earn from the rest of the world.

The strongest defence of the shilling is therefore not central-bank intervention, a law or a presidential directive.

It is an economy that earns more dollars than it needs to spend.

AFRICA HAS TOO MANY RICH MEN AND TOO FEW CAPITALISTS

2026-10-05T13:48:12.404+03:00

On Wednesday, Aliko Dangote stood in Lamu, Kenya, alongside African leaders and broke ground on a $16 billion oil refinery. The proposed plant will process 700,000 barrels of crude a day, include a 1,000MW power plant and, if completed as planned, rank among the largest refineries in the world.

Think about that.

Sixteen billion dollars. One African businessman. One African project.

That is why I have long argued that Dangote is a godsend for this continent.

Not because billionaires are saints—the Lamu project already faces legitimate land and environmental questions. But because he represents something Africa has in desperately short supply: indigenous capital willing to make bets at continental scale.

Countries are only as viable as their private sectors.

Governments can publish Vision 2040s and industrial policies. Eventually somebody has to write a cheque, build the factory, hire engineers, organise supply chains and wait years for a return.

Businesses, not governments, create wealth, jobs and goods and services. The role of government is to create an economic and legal environment in which more of those businesses can emerge and grow. We have more examples than I have space in this column to list the failed government businesses even in this NRM administration.

For years this column has argued that Africa is not poor. It is a deep-value play whose people, minerals, land and markets are consistently undervalued by bad politics, weak business skills and foreign risk models.

"Foreign capital sees political risk, currency risk, infrastructure gaps and regulatory uncertainty.

The spreadsheet says: run.

Dangote sees the same risks, but he has skin in the game...

That distinction matters. In 2024, writing about Uganda’s infrastructure financing, I argued that local investors often have a more nuanced understanding of African risk. What looks impossible from a London boardroom may be manageable if you understand the politics, people and terrain.

Dangote is that thesis on steroids.

There is another part of the story we underestimate. His commercial software is multigenerational. His great-grandfather, Alhassan Dantata, was among West Africa’s wealthiest traders. Dangote did not start at zero.

But the inheritance was more than money.

It was software.

How to judge risk. Negotiate. Preserve capital. Talk to bankers. Work through government. Reinvest. Survive reversals. Think in decades.

Wealth may be built in one generation and squandered by the third, but Dangote had flipped the script. Each generation appears to have built on what came before.

"That accumulated commercial intelligence now sits on top of a balance sheet large enough to underwrite ventures that would terrify most African governments—or put enough equity on the table for international money men to take notice.

He also straddles two worlds. He speaks the language of international capital—project finance, technical partners, equity, listings and return on capital, while navigating African governments, bureaucracies and the patronage systems surrounding large projects.

That brings us to an uncomfortable point.

Government support for big business is not automatically corruption.

I argued in 2020 that concessions can stimulate development if they back credible businesses, measurable outcomes and strategic industries. The problem is that support is too often handed to connected individuals with neither the competence nor intention to build anything.

The answer is not to stop backing winners.

It is to stop backing cronies.

Asia understood this better. Its governments helped create industrial champions, but eventually those champions had to export, compete and conquer markets. Africa too often protects rent-seekers instead of builders.

Dangote’s greatest achievement may therefore not be cement, fertiliser or even oil.

It may be confidence.

His Lagos refinery shattered a psychological ceiling. Projects of that scale were supposed to be built by multinationals, Gulf sovereigns or Chinese state companies. An African industrialist was supposed to trade, import, distribute and perhaps put up a respectable factory.

Dangote decided otherwise.

Now he is trying to reproduce the model in East Africa.

Success markets itself. Once investors see Africans successfully executing projects at this scale, they begin imagining steel mills, fertiliser plants, rail corridors and other mega-projects. Capital compounds, but confidence compounds too.

Africa therefore needs more Dangotes.

Not more rich men.

There is a difference.

A rich man wants to show that he has money. A capitalist wants to deploy money so it comes back with friends.

"A rich man measures success in VXs, mansions and little brown girls in tow. A capitalist measures it in productive assets, cashflows, factories and return on capital...

One consumes wealth.

The other reproduces it.

The tragedy of Africa is not that we have too many billionaires. It is that we have too few people whose ambitions have graduated from consumption to production and from national markets to continental ones.

Our governments should align development ambitions with indigenous capital while creating the conditions for larger African balance sheets: predictable policy, property rights, capital markets, patient finance and integrated regional markets.

Dangote will make enormous amounts of money if Lamu works.

Good.

If his billions come alongside jobs, skills, taxes, suppliers, infrastructure and cheaper energy, that is not a contradiction.

That is the bargain.

Capital makes money. Citizens live better.

"Our real failure would be to meet here again in 30 years and discover that Africa still has only one Dangote...

WHEN PAPER DIAMONDS OUTSHINE THE NSSF MAGIC

2026-10-04T16:14:27.390+03:00

For years, the lazy story around Kampala was that the Uganda Securities Exchange (USE) was "dead money." It was seen as a sleepy corporate club where capital went to rust while smart investors stuck to risk-free, double-digit government bonds.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the bank.

Institutional brokerage Crested Capital just released its Q3 2026 Total Shareholder Analysis, and it cuts clean through the stories we have been telling ourselves. Corporate Uganda is quietly experiencing an unprecedented operational awakening.

The baseline for investment success here has never been higher. Just the other night, the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) declared a jaw-dropping 22.53% interest rate for the year ended June 2026, crediting a massive Shs5.44 trillion to workers' accounts. It was the highest return in NSSF history.

Yet against that incredible benchmark, a small clutch of local equities—dubbed the "Black Diamonds"—shone exponentially brighter. Crested Capital defines a Black Diamond as a local listed company returning north of 25% over a specified period, handily thrashing treasury bills, standard unit trusts, and the NSSF.

But this glittering performance comes with a serious warning for individual wealth creators: dispersion on the USE is brutal. Select right, and your capital compounds meaningfully. Select wrong, and you can sit on capital erosion for years.

The Performance Sheet

To see how the elite stack up against each other and the wider market, look at the data from the first nine months of 2026:

Counter / Entity	Price (2-Jan-26)	Price (30-Sep-26)	Capital Gain	Total Shareholder Return (TSR)
NIC Holdings	UGX 5.00	UGX 19.00	280.00%	280.00%
Airtel Uganda	UGX 85.00	UGX 189.00	122.35%	128.12%
Bank of Baroda	UGX 47.00	UGX 90.50	92.55%	105.32%
Stanbic Uganda (SBU)	UGX 60.32	UGX 110.02	82.39%	89.52%
Uganda Clays Limited (UCL)	UGX 5.00	UGX 8.40	68.00%	68.00%
MTN Uganda (MTNU)	UGX 315.00	UGX 446.00	41.59%	47.06%
Quality Chemical Industries (QCIL)	UGX 116.00	UGX 161.88	39.55%	45.07%
NSSF FY 2025/2026 (Benchmark)	—	—	—	22.53%

The New Economic Plumbing

These numbers are not abstract paper tricks. They reflect a deep structural shift we have discussed before: telecoms and financial ecosystems have officially become the indispensable plumbing of modern economic life.

Consider the telecom battleground. MTN Uganda recently became the first company in our history to cross the historic $1 billion annual revenue mark (Shs3.6 trillion). Its fintech platform, MTN MoMo, processed Shs195.5 trillion in transaction value.

MTN's transactional volume nearly matches Uganda’s entire Shs200 trillion GDP, functioning as the financial bloodstream of the nation. While MTN leads in absolute scale, Airtel Uganda has displayed sharper data momentum and operating efficiency, fueling its stock re-rating from Shs85.00 to Shs189.00.

In the banking sector, the story is equally deep. Stanbic Bank has flexed its profit muscle, boosting interim dividends by 57.1% to Shs4.30 per share—returning capital to shareholders twice as fast as its underlying profit growth.

However, market dispersion remains unforgiving. While top counters thrive, others like New Vision (-3.33% TSR), BAT (-13.34% TSR), and Umeme (-73.97% TSR) face severe slumps or terminal regulatory risks, proving that selectivity is vital.

Ultimately, paper gains mean nothing until realized. As the report's parting warning notes, the TSR and capital gains are simply paper gains. You need to exit your position to earn the return, rather than watching the market move while eating your seed.

OPEN THE BOOKS, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

2026-09-29T09:32:42.634+03:00

A few weekends ago, I spent an entire day with a group of young Ugandans examining our financial health.

And I mean examining it properly.

Everyone was required to open their books — incomes, expenses, assets and liabilities — for all and sundry to see. We shared what we had done right, where we had gone wrong, what we had learned and opened ourselves up to both praise and criticism.

It was revelatory.

Money is one of those things we talk about endlessly without ever really talking about it. But numbers have a way of cutting through the stories we tell ourselves.

Here is what I took away.

1. Track your financials — what you focus on expands

Tracking your finances is essential, even critical, to financial health.

You need to know what is coming in, what is going out, what you own and what you owe.

Once you track the numbers consistently, patterns emerge. You see which expenses can be reduced, which habits are quietly draining you and which decisions are actually moving you forward.

Without records, we operate on impressions. We tell ourselves we are saving enough, spending reasonably or investing aggressively. The numbers may tell a very different story.

What you focus on expands.

The simple act of watching your income, expenses, assets and liabilities changes behaviour. You begin looking for ways to increase income, cut waste and redirect money towards assets.

Before you can improve your financial position, you need to know where you stand.

2. Start where you are, with what you have

Do not be discouraged by your current financial position.

Every mighty tree started as a seedling.

The person with Sh500m in assets once had Sh50m. Before that there may have been Sh5m. Somewhere there was a first shilling that was saved rather than spent.

Your current situation is a starting point, not a permanent condition.

Save something. Buy your first share. Start the small business. Pay off the expensive loan. Acquire the first productive asset.

The amounts may look insignificant at the beginning, but the habit is not. Capital compounds. Knowledge compounds. Experience compounds.

Do not despise small beginnings.

3. We have to unlearn a lot about money

One thing became very clear: getting onto the road to financial health requires more than earning more.

We have to unwind a lot of conditioning.

We have laboured under myths about money: debt is always bad; land is the only real investment; shares are gambling; a bigger salary automatically creates wealth; investing is only for people who already have money; looking successful means being successful.

Much of this thinking works against wealth creation.

Our financial behaviour is not just mathematics. It is psychology, culture, family expectations, fear, ego and status.

Unless we interrogate these assumptions, higher income may simply allow us to make the same mistakes on a bigger scale.

Before financial freedom appears on the balance sheet, it often has to begin in the mind.

4. Everyone’s journey is personal

Do not compare your Chapter One with somebody else’s Chapter Five.

They may have started earlier, earn more, inherited something, taken different risks or simply be further along.

Comparison becomes particularly dangerous when it pushes us into consumption.

Someone buys a new car, builds a house or takes an expensive holiday and suddenly we feel pressure to do the same.

But they may be eating their harvest while you are still planting.

One of the worst mistakes you can make is to eat your seed because somebody else is eating their harvest.

There is a season for accumulation and a season for enjoyment. If you are still building capital, protect it fiercely.

Your race is with the person you were yesterday.

5. Shift expenses towards investment — and stay on the compounding curve

The most powerful lesson was seeing compounding working in real life.

Not in Warren Buffett’s portfolio. Not in New York or London.

Here. In Uganda.

This same economy we are always mourning about.

We saw practical examples of young people steadily shifting expenditure away from consumption and towards investment, then giving time a chance to do the heavy lifting.

That is the trick.

Earn. Create a surplus. Turn the surplus into productive assets. Reinvest the returns. Repeat.

Eventually the money starts doing more of the work.

But compounding has one major enemy: interruption.

We interrupt it when every salary increase becomes a lifestyle upgrade, when dividends are consumed, when business profits finance status or when every windfall becomes a new phone, car or holiday.

The compounding effect should sit at the centre of every wealth-creation journey, whether you are a nine-to-five worker, farmer, hustler or downtown businessman.

What struck me most was that many of these kids are not yet 30.

I was in awe.

They are making sacrifices at exactly the age when everything around them screams YOLO and FOMO.

Yet they are quietly building.

Life will interrupt them — job losses, bad investments, family emergencies, illness, business setbacks.

But if they remain committed to the mission, these will be speed bumps, not roadblocks.

I left enormously hopeful about the future.

And, I confess, slightly envious.

Because many of them have understood something I wish I had understood much earlier.

They are already on the journey.

And when it comes to compounding, time may be the most valuable asset of all.

BOOK REVIEW: BLOODSHED FOR POWER: THE ASSASINATION OF MOHAMED HASSAN AND THE DARK ERA OF IDI AMIN

2026-09-26T12:23:53.248+03:00

Bloodshed for Power by Mohsin Hassan provides a poignant, intensely researched accounting of political murder, state terror and the human cost of unchecked ambition. Unfolding through personal tragedy, the narrative confronts one of the darkest chapters of East African political history, offering both a meticulous investigation into the murder of the author’s father—Mohamed Hassan, Uganda’s former Head of CID—and a broader reflection on institutionalised violence during the tragic collapse of a nation.

The Shadow of Idi Amin

To grasp the gravity of Hassan’s account, one must understand the backdrop of the dictator who destroyed much of Uganda’s post-independence promise.

General Idi Amin Dada seized control of the country in a 1971 military coup while President Milton Obote was attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore. What initially began with populist promises of swift stability quickly deteriorated into an infamous reign of terror. Amin dismantled democratic institutions, subverted the judiciary and turned state security organs into instruments for eliminating people regarded as threats—or who held inconvenient truths—about his regime.

Over the course of eight chaotic years, hundreds of thousands of Ugandans are estimated to have lost their lives through extrajudicial killings, targeted eliminations and ethnic and political persecution.

Mohamed Hassan became a target for Amin precisely because of his commitment to his work as a police investigator. As Head of CID, Hassan led high-profile murder investigations in which evidence implicated Amin prior to his presidency—most notably the January 1970 assassination of Brigadier Pierino Okoya and his wife.

Brigadier Okoya had openly challenged Amin, even mocking him as a coward for panicking and going AWOL following an earlier attempted assassination of President Milton Obote.

When Okoya and his wife were subsequently gunned down at their home, Hassan’s investigation uncovered evidence pointing towards Amin’s involvement. Hassan’s account argues that, once Amin seized power, those who knew too much about such investigations became obvious targets as the new regime sought to neutralise potential witnesses and erase inconvenient evidence.

Amin’s brutal dictatorship destabilised Uganda and the wider region until he was finally ousted by Tanzanian forces and Ugandan exiles in 1979. He lived out his remaining years in exile, dying in Saudi Arabia in 2003 without ever facing legal accountability for the atrocities associated with his regime.

Memory Against Revisionism

It is against this historical canvas that Mohsin Hassan’s work becomes so important.

One of the greatest strengths of the book is its preservation of historical memory. It is a useful addition to the literature on an era that is fast fading from living memory, creating space for revisionists to make increasingly sanitised claims about what happened.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest values of personal accounts such as Hassan’s.

These accounts are, by their very nature, woefully inadequate in capturing the full horror of the Amin era. No single family tragedy, however devastating, can communicate the suffering experienced across an entire country. For every Mohamed Hassan whose story has been reconstructed, there were countless others whose deaths were never properly investigated, whose bodies were never recovered, whose families never received answers and whose stories may never be written down.

Yet that does not diminish the importance of these individual accounts. If anything, it makes them more urgent.

History written only in statistics can become abstract. We hear of hundreds of thousands dead and, paradoxically, struggle to comprehend the scale. But when that history is reduced to one father, one family, one disappearance, one investigation and one trail of unanswered questions, the horror becomes human again.

Hassan's story therefore serves as more than a biography of one victim. It reminds us that behind every statistic from that period stood a person with a name, a family, ambitions and people waiting for them to come home.

As key witnesses age, documentation disappears and memories fade, books like Bloodshed for Power become important bulwarks against historical amnesia. By painstakingly documenting the circumstances surrounding one political killing, Hassan helps ensure that at least part of the record survives rather than being surrendered to nostalgia, revisionism or political convenience.

Gripping Yet Devastating Narrative

While heartbreaking, the book makes for scintillating reading.

Hassan manages to balance the deep emotional weight of personal tragedy with the fast-paced momentum of an investigative thriller. The emotional core of the story lies in the grief and unanswered questions left in the wake of an assassination, yet the author maintains a gripping, highly readable narrative rhythm that keeps the reader engaged through every step of the investigation.

That is no easy achievement. Books dealing with atrocity can sometimes become overwhelmed by their subject matter. Hassan instead lets the investigation carry the narrative, allowing the reader to discover the story almost alongside him.

Methodological Elegance

In this respect, Bloodshed for Power falls into the same broad tradition as The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget in the way personal history is reconstructed through the testimony of others.

Rather than relying solely on family memory, Hassan pieces together police records, eyewitness statements, archival evidence and local accounts to reconstruct the events leading to his father's demise.

This investigative rigour elevates a personal quest for closure into something approaching historical documentation. More than that, Bloodshed for Power is, at its heart, a work of investigative journalism. Hassan follows leads, tests recollections against other accounts, assembles fragments of evidence and reconstructs events from sources scattered across time and geography. He does not merely tell us what he believes happened to his father; he sets out to establish how and why it happened.

There is something particularly poignant about that.

Mohamed Hassan spent his professional life as an investigator, following evidence wherever it led, including when that evidence touched powerful men. Decades later, his son has effectively undertaken an investigation of his own—this time into the fate of the investigator himself.

One imagines that there could be few more fitting tributes.

The patience, persistence and respect for evidence evident in this book may very well have made his father proud.

The mosaic of third-party perspectives also does more than validate the author's conclusions. It gives us glimpses into the atmosphere of fear, silence and complicity within which political violence operated. People knew things but could not necessarily say them. Institutions existed but had been hollowed out. Officials understood the dangers around them but often had few places to turn.

That is how terror ultimately works: not simply by killing people, but by teaching everybody else to remain silent.

The Imperative of Facing the Past

The core philosophical argument running through Bloodshed for Power is therefore the necessity of truth-telling.

It would undoubtedly be easier to sweep this dark era under the rug. Nations, like families, sometimes prefer uncomfortable silence to painful confrontation with their past.

But there is value in airing our dirty linen if only so that we can resolve: never again.

The temptation to "move on" without truth, reconciliation or accountability can be powerful, particularly in societies desperate for political stability. But buried trauma does not necessarily disappear. Unresolved history can continue shaping institutions, political culture and collective memory decades after the events themselves.

Airing these painful truths is therefore not an act of malice or revenge. It is part of understanding how institutions failed, how power became unaccountable and how ordinary people became victims of political struggles over which they had little control.

Only by understanding those failures can subsequent generations hope not to reproduce them.

Final Reflection

Ultimately, Hassan’s work is a sobering reminder of human fallibility and political repetition.

As the saying goes, the thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.

Bloodshed for Power challenges that cynical conclusion by insisting on memory.

Personal histories such as Hassan's will never fully capture the scale of what Uganda endured during those years. They are fragments of a much larger tragedy. But perhaps it is precisely through accumulating these fragments—one murdered official, one disappeared student, one grieving widow, one frightened witness, one family searching for answers—that a country begins to reconstruct the true dimensions of its past.

The great danger comes when those stories stop being told.

Because once the witnesses are gone and the personal accounts disappear, statistics become easier to dispute, atrocities easier to minimise and dictatorships easier to romanticise.

That is why books such as Bloodshed for Power matter.

They remind us that history did not happen to numbers.

It happened to people.

And in Mohsin Hassan’s case, there is one final symmetry that is difficult to miss: the son has used the tools of investigation, evidence and persistence to finish a story that violence tried to leave unfinished.

For a man who devoted his own career to uncovering the truth, Mohamed Hassan may very well have regarded that as the finest tribute of all.

NSSF’S 22.53%: WHEN COMPOUNDING STARTS TO LOOK LIKE MAGIC

2026-09-26T09:16:47.604+03:00

On Thursday night, millions of Ugandans with savings at the National Social Security Fund went to bed considerably richer than they had woken up.

The Fund declared an interest rate of 22.53 percent for the year ended June 2026, the highest in its 40-year history. In money terms, Shs5.44 trillion will be credited to members’ accounts.

For perspective, last year the Fund paid 13.5 percent. Average inflation during the year was about 3.3 percent, meaning members earned a real return of about 19 percentage points. Better still, over the last decade NSSF has credited members with returns averaging about 12.6 percent annually. (NSSF Integrated Report 2026)

That is where the real story begins.

We tend to get excited by spectacular years and ignore the boring years that made them possible. But wealth is rarely built in dramatic bursts. It is built by putting money away, earning a return, reinvesting that return and resisting the temptation to interrupt the process.

NSSF may be Uganda’s biggest practical demonstration of compounding.

Its assets have grown from around Shs5.6 trillion in 2015 to Shs32.87 trillion today. In just the last year, the balance sheet grew 26 percent from Shs26 trillion. (NSSF Integrated Report 2026)

A billion shillings starts with one shilling. The mighty tree starts as a seedling. The trick is staying on the compounding curve long enough for the numbers to begin looking ridiculous.

NSSF’s numbers are beginning to look ridiculous.

Total income jumped 85 percent to Shs6.51 trillion. Contributions increased to Shs2.42 trillion while benefits paid rose to Shs1.55 trillion.

But this year also offers another important lesson in investing: diversification requires patience.

NSSF has substantial investments outside Uganda. That exposes it not only to share-price movements but to currencies.

We saw the ugly side of that in 2022/23, when depreciation of regional currencies, particularly the Kenya shilling, left the Fund nursing foreign-exchange losses of about Shs1.05 trillion. Last year the strengthening Uganda shilling again worked against NSSF, producing forex losses of about Shs274 billion, even as regional stockmarkets performed reasonably well.

This year the pendulum swung the other way.

Currency movements added about Shs173 billion to the Fund’s income. But the real fireworks came from regional equities.

Shares, although only about 18 percent of the portfolio, generated roughly 43 percent of total income

. NSSF’s equity portfolio returned an astonishing 60.8 percent, compared with 25.2 percent the previous year, as banks and telecom shares across East Africa rallied strongly. Holdings including CRDB, NMB, MTN, Airtel and KCB recorded significant gains.

There is a wonderful investing lesson here.

Had NSSF panicked when regional currencies collapsed and markets went against it, sold everything and retreated home, members might never have enjoyed this year’s upside.

Markets move. Currencies move. Yesterday’s dog can become tomorrow’s star.

A long-term investor does not judge an investment strategy on one bad year—or one spectacular one.

Which brings us to the future.

NSSF has revised its Vision 2035 asset target from Shs50 trillion to Shs80 trillion

, while seeking to expand social-security coverage to about 15 million people. That means the informal economy—boda riders, farmers, traders and millions of self-employed Ugandans—will increasingly become central to the Fund’s growth...

But getting to Shs80 trillion creates another problem: where do you put all that money?

Today about three-quarters of the portfolio is in fixed income. Government securities have served NSSF exceedingly well, providing predictable cashflows and attractive yields.

But an Shs80 trillion Fund cannot just keep buying government bonds forever.

Increasingly, NSSF will have to look at infrastructure, private equity, businesses, regional markets and other long-term assets. With scale comes the possibility of becoming one of the most important pools of patient capital in East Africa.

And with that opportunity comes danger.

"NSSF is not a development bank. Members’ savings cannot become a convenient pot for every politically attractive road, hotel or factory. Every investment must pass one overriding test: does the expected risk-adjusted return justify putting workers’ retirement savings into it?

Nobody should expect 22.53 percent every year.

Interest rates will fall. Stockmarkets will retreat. The shilling will strengthen and weaken. Some years regional investments will deliver spectacular gains; in others currency translation alone may wipe hundreds of billions off their Ugandan-shilling value.

That is investing.

The bigger lesson from Thursday night is therefore not really 22.53 percent.

It is what happens when capital is accumulated, diversified, professionally invested and allowed to compound for decades.

Forty years of contributions and reinvestment have created an institution capable of crediting Shs5.44 trillion to its members in one year.

For the individual wealth creator, the instruction could hardly be clearer:

"Start where you are. Invest what you can. Diversify. Reinvest the harvest. And whatever you do, try not to interrupt the compounding...

Given enough time, boring can become spectacular.

NSSF SHIFTS GOALPOSTS WITH SH80TRILION TARGET

2026-09-22T09:56:03.646+03:00

The biggest number in the National Social Security Fund’s (NSSF) latest results is not the Sh6.51 trillion it earned last year. It is not even the Sh32.8 trillion it now has under management.

It is Sh80 trillion.

NSSF has revised upwards the asset target under its 10-year Vision 2035 strategy from Sh50 trillion to Sh80 trillion after its performance suggested the old target would be reached far too early.

“We had to revise this because projections suggested Sh50 trillion was not ambitious enough,” NSSF Managing Director Patrick Ayota said.

Management reckons that at its current trajectory the Fund could reach Sh50 trillion around 2029 or 2030 — several years ahead of schedule.

You can see why.

"Assets under management jumped 26 percent in the year to June 2026, to Sh32.8 trillion from Sh26 trillion. Five years ago they stood at Sh15.6 trillion.

Sometimes numbers become so large that we lose perspective. So it is worth looking backwards.

Forty years ago, NSSF was a tiny institution whose assets were measured in billions, not trillions. Twenty years ago, it was still largely a compulsory savings scheme struggling with weak compliance, cumbersome systems and limited public confidence. By around 2010 it had just over Sh2 trillion in assets, customer satisfaction was below 50 percent and a benefit claim could take more than 100 days to process. About 10 years ago, assets were around Sh5.6 trillion. Today they are Sh32.8 trillion, customer satisfaction is 89 percent and benefits are processed in an average 4.5 days.

And another NSSF story recently almost snuck up on us.

When President Yoweri Museveni opened the new Marriott development in Kampala a few weeks ago, we learnt that NSSF had taken a 30 percent stake in the project, putting the overall project valuation at about Sh500 billion...

Think about that. Ugandan workers’ savings now have the muscle to take a substantial position in a Sh500 billion hospitality development.

The Marriott investment also tells us something about where NSSF’s growing financial muscle may increasingly be deployed.

Traditionally its core portfolio has been government securities, listed equities and real estate. Fixed income still accounts for 76.5 percent of assets, equities 18.4 percent and real estate 5.1 percent.

But management is looking for opportunities beyond these traditional investments.

The Marriott is a good example. NSSF says tourism is one of Uganda’s strategic growth areas. The investment case was based partly on data showing rising visitor arrivals but relatively short stays in Uganda — often two or three days compared with longer stays in neighbouring destinations.

One possible reason is the shortage of internationally recognised facilities capable of keeping high-spending visitors here longer.

So NSSF assessed the investment through both financial and social lenses: returns to members, employment, demand for agriculture and other supplies and the potential to attract conferences and international events.

That distinction matters. NSSF is not a development bank. It is investing workers’ money and every investment must first make financial sense.

But a Sh32.8 trillion Fund can increasingly do both — generate returns while financing productive capacity.

Infrastructure could be another frontier.

NSSF says it has already committed to the Jinja expressway project and is prepared to invest more as projects become investment-ready. Its message to government is straightforward: do the feasibility studies, complete the designs, acquire the rights of way and bring bankable projects to the table. NSSF can then provide long-term finance.

This is what a country with growing domestic savings should eventually look like.

The latest results show the firepower available. Total income surged 85 percent to Sh6.51 trillion. Realised income increased 24 percent to Sh3.88 trillion, interest income rose 21 percent to Sh3.49 trillion and dividend income jumped 55 percent to Sh369 billion...

Member contributions increased 13 percent to Sh2.42 trillion, while benefits paid rose 17 percent to Sh1.549 trillion.

But one number that particularly catches my eye is Sh180 billion.

That is how much Smartlife Flexi, NSSF’s voluntary savings product, accumulated in just 20 months following its November 2024 launch.

That surge in voluntary savings may be an important part of the journey to Sh80 trillion.

Growth can no longer depend only on compulsory deductions from formal-sector workers. There is a vast universe of businesspeople, professionals, informal workers and other Ugandans looking for credible places to accumulate long-term savings.

There will be mistakes along the way. NSSF officials made this point while discussing Uganda Clays, one of the Fund’s difficult historical investments.

No investor predicts the future perfectly. That is why you diversify.

The correct measure is not whether every investment succeeds, but whether the portfolio as a whole consistently grows members’ wealth.

And this is perhaps the bigger story behind the new Sh80 trillion target.

"NSSF has evolved from a relatively modest compulsory savings scheme into the biggest pools of indigenous capital Uganda has ever created...

Now imagine what Sh80 trillion can do.

POWER, MUHOOZI AND THE MAN STILL HOLDING THE CARDS

2026-09-15T23:16:03.173+03:00

Power is the ability to influence people, events and things—to make something happen that otherwise might not happen.

Money is power. Office is power. Information is power. Control of institutions is power. The ability to reward, protect, punish or exclude is power.

But power is rarely an end in itself. It is a means to an end. You need power to implement an agenda, protect an interest, change society or preserve an existing political order.

Which is why the first order of business after acquiring power is usually to keep it.

This is where the world of power separates itself from the ordinary morality by which most of us conduct our lives...

Most people are brought up to think in neat categories: good and evil, right and wrong, loyalty and betrayal. The successful power player has to think additionally in terms of interests, consequences, alliances, timing and survival.

Yesterday's enemy may become today's ally. Yesterday's friend can become tomorrow's liability. One individual may be sacrificed to preserve a much larger coalition. Intentions may be concealed because revealing them prematurely allows adversaries to organise.

This amorality does not mean that everything done in pursuit of power is right or lawful. Far from it. But to understand politics, it can sometimes be more useful initially to ask not whether an action is good or bad, but: What does this action achieve?

Seen this way, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba's recent behaviour deserves examination beyond the outrage it often produces.

There is little doubt that Muhoozi is accumulating power.

He is Chief of Defence Forces. He chairs the Patriotic League of Uganda. He has publicly announced his intention to contest the presidency in 2031. Political and business figures are increasingly organising around him. Reuters describes him as having long been considered a potential successor to his father.

More interestingly, he seems willing to break some of the cosy arrangements that developed during four decades of Museveni's rule.

Museveni's political genius has never simply been coercion. It has also been accommodation.

He brought opponents inside. He balanced factions. He allowed competing networks of influence to coexist beneath his ultimate authority. An opponent today could become a minister tomorrow. A businessman in trouble might know somebody in State House. A politician quarrelling with one security agency might find protection through another power centre.

A political culture emerged in which virtually every important person knew another important person.

It worked.

"Museveni's longevity has been attributed by observers to strategic patience, shifting alliances and firm control of the military alongside his ability to manage competing interests...

An urban political and business elite flourished inside this arrangement.

And this may explain why parts of that elite look so uncomfortable with Muhoozi.

Consider the range.

Kizza Besigye is a former Museveni physician and NRM insider turned opposition leader.

Erias Lukwago is one of Kampala's most established political figures.

Odrek Rwabwogo is not merely a businessman and presidential adviser. He is Museveni's son-in-law.

Anita Among rose to become Speaker of Parliament.

Yet proximity, title and establishment credentials increasingly appear incapable of guaranteeing insulation from Muhoozi.

Following Lukwago's detention, The Observer reported extraordinary reluctance among senior politicians and civil-society leaders to comment publicly. One unnamed NRM legislator told the newspaper that politicians had realised Muhoozi was not bluffing.

"That is an important characteristic of power.

Its highest expression is not when you continuously punish people. It is when people adjust their behaviour because they believe you might...

Then came the almost comic spectacle surrounding a reported celebration for Among.

State Minister Justine Nameere Nsubuga hurried to distance herself from suggestions that she was organising it. The significance was not the party. It was the political body language.

In the old order, powerful people negotiated around one another.

In the emerging order, people appear increasingly careful not even to be mistaken for standing in the wrong place.

That tells us something.

"But what may shock Uganda's traditional elite even more is the apparent absence of widespread public sympathy for its discomfort...

This needs qualification. Opposition politicians, lawyers, human-rights activists and others have certainly spoken against arrests, detention and abuses of due process.

But there has been no obvious national popular mobilisation demanding protection of the old political establishment.

And absence of sympathy does not necessarily mean approval of Muhoozi.

It may simply reflect public alienation from an elite that many Ugandans believe has prospered disproportionately during the last four decades.

For years ordinary citizens have watched politicians accumulate wealth, businessmen cultivate political connections and public servants live lives far removed from the people they administer.

Now some members of that establishment are discovering arbitrariness and asking the country to be alarmed.

A Ugandan struggling to pay school fees might reasonably ask: When the system was working in your favour, where was your outrage?

Muhoozi may understand this instinctively.

Breaking elite networks can therefore serve two purposes simultaneously. It intimidates potential rivals while cultivating the image of a man unwilling to tolerate untouchable insiders.

The elite may call it persecution.

Sections of the public may see an overdue disruption of privilege.

Whether that perception is deserved is a different question. Due process remains due process. Breaking elite impunity is not the same thing as replacing institutions with personal discretion.

But there is an even larger complication.

What if Muhoozi himself is partly a red herring?

Everybody discussing succession—including those rapidly aligning themselves with Muhoozi—would be wise to remember that there remains one supreme practitioner of power in Uganda.

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

Museveni is a guerrilla before he is almost anything else politically.

The guerrilla survives through constant vigilance, constant movement and constant suspicion. He does not reveal his position unnecessarily. He keeps several escape routes open. He watches his comrades almost as carefully as his enemies. He allows an opponent to concentrate on one position while manoeuvring somewhere else.

Museveni's political career has repeatedly demonstrated patience, tactical flexibility and an ability to change alliances while retaining ultimate control. His major influence lie in a five-year guerrilla struggle in which mobility, political organisation, intelligence and careful preparation were indispensable.

And Museveni is not famous for telegraphing his intentions.

Which makes the apparent certainty around Muhoozi dangerous.

We have actually seen this movie before.

Ahead of the 2026 election, Muhoozi's presidential ambitions dominated political conversation. His political mobilisation accelerated. His supporters organised. Opponents debated the so-called Muhoozi Project endlessly.

As early as 2022, one remarkably prescient commentary proposed exactly the alternative theory: that Muhoozi might function as a decoy drawing political attention while Museveni quietly prepared for another presidential run.

That is essentially what happened.

Muhoozi had previously declared an intention to run, eventually withdrew, and Museveni returned to the ballot in January 2026 and secured another term.

So why assume 2031 is already settled?

Museveni could genuinely be preparing Muhoozi.

He could be testing him.

He could be allowing him to establish authority while observing which politicians rush to his camp.

He could be using Muhoozi to discipline an elite that Museveni himself cannot easily attack after decades of accumulated relationships.

He could be allowing two centres of power to develop so that every ambitious politician reveals his loyalties.

Or Muhoozi's ascendancy could once again be absorbing everybody's attention while Museveni keeps his own intentions deliberately obscure.

Several of these things could even be true simultaneously.

The guerrilla does not need the decoy to know that it is a decoy.

That is the genius of a good diversion.

Muhoozi can sincerely believe he is building his succession. His followers can genuinely believe they are joining the next administration. His adversaries can genuinely reorganise themselves to confront him.

And all of them can still be serving Museveni's interests.

Think what the current situation gives the President.

Politicians who believe Muhoozi is inevitable expose themselves by rushing towards him.

Those who oppose Muhoozi expose themselves too.

Businesspeople choose sides.

Old political relationships are broken.

The security establishment reveals where its loyalties lie.

Potential alternative successors either surface or retreat.

And Museveni gets to watch.

That is priceless intelligence for a man whose first political instincts were formed in guerrilla warfare.

It may therefore be premature to interpret Muhoozi's increasingly assertive conduct as proof that the succession has been settled.

Indeed, a 2026 examination of Museveni's new Cabinet specifically asked whether its composition might actually be putting brakes on Muhoozi's apparent ascension, illustrating how ambiguous the signals remain even inside government.

Muhoozi unquestionably matters.

His power is real.

His ability to frighten sections of the political class is real.

His network is growing.

His presidential ambition is now explicit.

But there is a difference between being powerful and being the successor.

And there is a difference between Museveni allowing something to happen and Museveni having decided how it will end.

At 81, after four decades in power and more than half a century immersed in politics, Museveni remains extraordinarily difficult to read. His political biography is one of adaptation: Marxist intellectual, guerrilla commander, revolutionary leader, liberal economic reformer, regional security partner and finally one of Africa's longest-serving presidents.

Survival has required constant adjustment.

So perhaps the most interesting question in Uganda today is not whether Muhoozi is demonstrating power.

Clearly he is.

The question is:

Whose power is ultimately being demonstrated?

His?

His father's?

Or both?

Uganda's elite may be scrambling to accommodate the man they believe will succeed Museveni.

They should remember one of the oldest rules of power.

Never declare the battle finished while the old guerrilla is still on the battlefield.

IT DOESN’T PAY TO BET AGAINST THE FUTURE

2026-09-15T09:25:21.510+03:00

I hate sitting in traffic.

I will use any number of back roads and questionable shortcuts to avoid it. Sitting motionless behind another car feels like a criminal waste of time — time I could spend reading, writing, meeting people or doing any number of useful things to improve my life and that of my loved ones.

Of course, I could go analogue and hire a driver. What is the going rate for a driver these days, I wonder?

But my worries may soon be over.

The other week Tesla put its purpose-built Cybercab into limited public service in Austin, Texas. It is a two-seater with no steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal.

Clutches? Those disappeared from this conversation a long time ago.

You summon the car from your phone, it picks you up, delivers you and goes off looking for its next fare.

Nirvana.

But what really excites me is not the car. It is the productivity.

I know a thing or two about technology improving productivity.

When I started in journalism, we used typewriters — noisy mechanical contraptions where competence was partly measured by how many words you could hammer out per minute.

I would write my story longhand first, then type it. If I wanted to move a paragraph, there was no cut and paste. Sometimes you tore out the page and started again.

Then I got myself a PC.

Suddenly I could type directly onto the screen, edit freely and move paragraphs around. Minutes disappeared from producing every story. Spread that across dozens of stories and hours had been returned to my life.

Because I had no printer, I saved stories onto floppy disks — which were anything but floppy — took them to the office and printed them there.

Then came email. The moment the story was finished, I could send it to my editor.

Then Google arrived and instead of spending hours digging through dusty newspaper files looking for the odd statistic, I could find it in seconds.

Today we have ChatGPT. Apart from helping me organise information faster, I can throw an argument at it and ask it to play devil's advocate before I inflict the argument on you.

And don’t get me started on smartphones.

Believe it or not, there was a time when mobile phones were not only a novelty but were really only good for making voice calls and sending text messages.

That was revolutionary enough...

Then somebody connected the phone to the internet.

Today that little gadget in your pocket is a bank, newspaper, camera, television, map, library, music player, office, marketplace and communications centre.

I can write a column on it, send money, check my investments, hold a meeting, look up an obscure fact, book a hotel or find my way around a city I have never visited.

All from something we still quaintly call a “phone”.

That is what technological progress does. It takes something we understand, adds capabilities we could hardly have imagined and eventually makes us wonder how we ever lived without them.

Every technological leap has essentially done the same thing.

It has given me back time.

That is why autonomous cars excite me.

Elon Musk has long argued that

autonomy could transform a car from a depreciating asset parked for most of the day into a productive asset. At Tesla’s Autonomy Day in 2019 he projected that a robotaxi could generate about $30,000 a year in gross profit under Tesla’s assumptions...

Whether that exact number proves correct is almost beside the point.

A car that can work while you sleep fundamentally changes the economics of car ownership.

And I may not even have to wait for Tesla.

China is coming.

Chinese manufacturers are moving rapidly into autonomous vehicles and robotaxi services and, if their performance in smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles is any guide, somebody in Shenzhen is probably working out how to give me the same technology at a price I can afford.

That is the beauty of competition.

Tesla asks: can this be done?

China asks: how cheaply can we do it?

Knowing our regulators, however, I suspect a steering-wheel-free Cybercab will not be cruising along Kampala Road anytime soon.

But then again, Uganda Police recently reported that 97 percent of taxis it inspected in Kampala had defects serious enough to qualify as being in Dangerous Mechanical Condition(DMC).

So if our regulatory system can “accommodate” public service vehicles with questionable brakes, tyres, lights, doors and assorted other inconveniences, who is going to ice my perfectly functioning Tesla merely because it insists on driving itself?

I ask only half in jest.

In any case, I probably do not need a full Cybercab.

A conventional Tesla with a steering wheel and sufficiently capable self-driving software would do me very nicely. I could crawl through Kampala’s morning traffic reading, answering emails or working while the machine handled the drudgery.

Full Self-Driving is not yet approved for Uganda, and regulation will inevitably lag the technology.

But that is precisely the point.

Technology keeps moving.

Which brings me to Thomas Malthus and his illustrious company of doomsayers.

Malthus worried that population would grow faster than food production, eventually condemning humanity to recurring famine.

What he could not adequately account for was human ingenuity.

Mechanisation came. Fertilisers came. Better seeds came. Irrigation improved. Refrigeration improved. Logistics improved. Agricultural science improved.

We produced more from the same acre and moved food further at lower cost.

"The recurring mistake of pessimists is to project tomorrow using today’s productivity...

Population will increase — assume crop yields remain unchanged.

Cities will grow — assume transport remains unchanged.

Energy demand will rise — assume energy technology remains unchanged.

Traffic will worsen — assume a human being must continue sitting behind every steering wheel, staring at the bumper in front of him.

That is a dangerous way to forecast the future.

Innovation does not abolish problems. It creates new ones. Jobs disappear, industries are disrupted and regulators scramble to catch up.

But innovation continually expands the number of solutions available to us.

And productivity is the great wealth machine.

If technology allows me to produce in one hour what previously required two days, I have become richer even before my bank balance reflects it.

BOOK REVIEW: BEFORE GOVT BLAMES THE MARKET, UNTIE ITS SHOE LACES

2026-09-08T08:05:36.786+03:00

Book: The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing

Author: Magatte Wade

Imagine entering Usain Bolt in a 100-metre race, tying his shoelaces together, putting a sack of cement on his back and then, when he finishes last, announcing triumphantly that sprinting does not work.

That, in many ways, is what African governments have done to the private sector.

Which is why Magatte Wade’s TheHeart of a Cheetah resonated so strongly with me.

Wade, a Senegalese entrepreneur, is a woman after my own heart. Her central argument is simple: Africa’s best chance of escaping poverty lies not in more aid, more government enterprises or another round of grand development plans, but in unleashing entrepreneurs...

I agree.

Africa is not short of ambitious people. Neither are we short of resources. We have minerals, agricultural land, energy, young populations and increasingly large markets.

What we have consistently lacked is an environment that allows Africans to turn all these advantages into wealth.

And this is where Wade makes one of her most important observations.

Across the continent, governments are creeping back into business, often on the argument that the free market has failed.

But what free market?

Take Uganda.

In the World Bank’s final Doing Business rankings in 2020, Uganda ranked 116th out of 190 economies overall. We were 169th for starting a business and 168th for getting electricity.

Then we turn around and say the private sector has failed.

Failed under what conditions?

"Entrepreneurs operate with expensive electricity, inadequate infrastructure, costly credit, bureaucracy, licences, taxes, unpredictable regulation and delays moving goods.

Then government looks at the resulting weak private sector and declares: “You see? Markets do not work. Government must intervene.”

You cannot tie Usain Bolt’s shoelaces together and then conclude that sprinting does not work.

That argument should make us nervous because we have seen this movie before.

After independence, much of Africa embraced socialism and state capitalism. Governments owned banks, hotels, factories, farms, transport companies and trading enterprises.

The reasoning sounded noble.

The private sector was weak. Local capital was scarce. Government therefore had to step in and lead development.

What followed in many countries was predictable.

State enterprises became centres of inefficiency and patronage. Losses were covered by taxpayers. Jobs became political rewards. Procurement enriched connected insiders.

"Socialism did not abolish elites.

It simply created a different route into the elite...

Instead of creating wealth by satisfying customers, the quickest route to wealth became proximity to government.

And that is what worries about the renewed enthusiasm for government getting directly back into business.

Already, some interventions dressed up as industrial policy look suspiciously like mechanisms for appropriating public money for the benefit of a connected few...

Government announces a project.

Taxpayer money is allocated.

There is a commissioning ceremony, flags, speeches, television cameras and photographs of important people cutting ribbons.

Then come the questions that really matter.

Where are the sales?

Where are the profits?

Where are the exports?

Where is the return on taxpayers’ capital?

Silence.

A private businessman does not have that luxury. If nobody buys his product, he eventually closes shop.

Government can return to Parliament and ask for another appropriation.

This is why Wade believe the free market remains Africa’s best chance of prosperity.

Not because markets are perfect. They are not.

Not because businessmen are saints. They are not either.

But markets impose a discipline that government enterprises rarely face. You must produce something people want, at a price they are prepared to pay. If you do that well, you grow. If you do it badly, someone else takes your customers.

That constant pressure to improve is where productivity, innovation and ultimately wealth come from.

Government has a critical role in this process, but it is a different role.

"Government should protect property rights, enforce contracts, maintain security, educate people, build infrastructure, ensure reliable electricity and maintain macroeconomic stability.

In other words, government should make it ridiculously easy to do business...

Then a virtuous cycle begins.

Businesses grow and employ people. Workers earn incomes and consume more. Companies make profits and reinvest. Government collects more tax from a larger economy without necessarily increasing tax rates.

Those revenues finance better infrastructure and public services, which lower the cost of doing business further.

More investment follows.

The economy expands again.

That is the cycle we should be chasing.

Instead, too often we do the reverse. We tax a small formal private sector more heavily, regulate it more aggressively and then use some of those taxes to finance government businesses that compete against it.

Then we complain that enterprise is weak.

And dare I say it, we should remember where this road can end.

Many African economies travelled it in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Governments accumulated loss-making parastatals. Budget deficits widened. Debt mounted. Foreign exchange became scarce. Economies stagnated.

Eventually we went back, cap in hand, to the World Bank and IMF and were prescribed the dreaded Structural Adjustment Programmes...

Privatise.

Liberalise.

Cut subsidies.

Reduce government spending.

Allow markets to work.

SAPs remain a dirty word in much of Africa, and understandably so. The adjustment was painful and, in some cases, brutally implemented.

"But we should remember what brought us to the hospital.

If we rebuild the same bloated state enterprises, finance politically connected projects indefinitely and crowd out private capital, we should not be surprised if we eventually require the same unpleasant medicine...

There is an irony here worth appreciating.

We may spend the next decade claiming the free market failed, only to eventually invite the World Bank and IMF back to tell us to embrace the free market again.

Better not to make the journey.

The Heart of a Cheetah is ultimately an optimistic book because Wade refuses to accept that Africa is condemned to poverty.

Africa does not need governments trying to outrun the cheetahs.

It needs governments to build the roads, provide the electricity, enforce the rules, protect property and then get out of the way.

Untie the entrepreneurs’ shoelaces.

Clear the track.

Let the cheetahs run.

Because the road back to Structural Adjustment Programmes may well be paved with loss-making government enterprises.

NRM’S BIGGEST SUCCESS MAY BE WHY THE YOUNG ARE ANGRY

2026-09-01T09:06:19.143+03:00

One of the NRM’s biggest problems after 40 years in power is that some of its greatest achievements are being discounted precisely because they have lasted so long.

Give people an inch and, quite naturally, they will want a mile.

For much of Uganda’s first quarter-century after independence, the questions were painfully basic. Will I get home safely tonight? Will my property still be mine tomorrow? Will there be sugar, soap or salt in the shops? Will another coup or war overturn everything?

Today those questions sound almost absurd.

That, whatever else one thinks about the NRM, is part of its achievement.

Its two greatest legacies will probably be the restoration of security and the revival of an economy wrecked by political turmoil, economic mismanagement and war.

Younger Ugandans often roll their eyes when older people say: “At least we can sleep.”

It sounds like an embarrassingly low bar.

But those five words carry a deeper meaning.

People who lived in Kampala in the early 1980s remember a city that was often compared to Beirut: gunfire, curfews, roadblocks, armed men and the uncertainty of whether you would make it home.

So “at least we can sleep” is not really about bedtime...

It is shorthand for restored security.

And security underpins almost every economic gain we have made since.

You do not build factories, banks, hotels, telecom networks or supermarkets where property rights are meaningless and armed men can undo years of work in one afternoon.

Security was the foundation.

Everything else came on top of it.

But success resets expectations.

A Ugandan born in 2000 is not going to congratulate government because soldiers do not routinely drag people out of their homes at night.

Why should they?

Security is what governments are supposed to provide.

Their questions are different.

Where is my job? Why is housing unaffordable? Why am I still dependent on my parents after university? Why do connections sometimes seem to count for more than competence?

These are legitimate questions.

The same generational disconnect applies to liberalisation.

Many younger Ugandans do not realise how many things they now treat as basic were once privileges.

Take the telephone.

There was a time when getting a telephone line from Uganda Posts and Telecommunications Corporation could take years. You filled in forms, followed up repeatedly and hoped your application had not disappeared into the mountains of paperwork.

"Today there are more telephone users than there were Ugandans in 1986...

That is not a small transformation.

The same applies, to varying degrees, to electricity, banking and the internet. Goods and services once concentrated among government offices, big companies and a narrow urban elite are now accessible to millions.

None of this means access is universal or affordable enough.

It simply means progress happened.

And this is where the NRM’s next challenge lies.

"The gains of the last four decades will remain politically fragile if too many Ugandans believe they have been captured by a relatively small urban elite...

There is still much to achieve in narrowing disparities in wealth, income and opportunity.

For the urban graduate, frustration may mean a poorly paid job, expensive rent and the feeling that connections matter too much.

For the rural young person, it may mean poor roads, weak schools, limited access to finance, unreliable power and little realistic chance of moving from subsistence to wealth creation.

Economic growth is not enough if too many people remain spectators.

The next phase must therefore be about widening ownership of the gains already made.

More Ugandans need to own productive assets. More farmers need to move into commercial agriculture. More small businesses need to become medium-sized businesses. More households need access to good education, affordable credit, reliable electricity and functioning markets.

The question can no longer simply be whether Uganda is richer than it was in 1986.

The question is how widely that prosperity is shared.

There is, however, another danger: assuming all this progress was inevitable.

It was not.

Countries can go backwards.

Economies can collapse.

Institutions can be destroyed far faster than they are built.

"One symptom of our fading historical memory is the growing revisionism around Idi Amin, especially the claim that expelling Asians in 1972 was some heroic act of economic nationalism...

It was not.

The expulsion removed people who had accumulated commercial knowledge, capital, supplier relationships and management experience over generations and handed businesses to politically favoured beneficiaries, many of whom had neither built them nor knew how to run them.

Factories collapsed. Shops emptied. Supply chains broke.

Ironically, Asians later returned and are today, once again, among the main drivers of Uganda’s commercial and industrial life.

There is a lesson there.

Capital is not created by confiscation.

Entrepreneurial ability cannot be transferred by presidential decree.

"Prosperity cannot be redistributed before somebody creates it...

A generation that never experienced the destruction can afford to romanticise it.

History without memory easily becomes mythology.

None of this gives the NRM a permanent pass.

Forty years later, telling a 25-year-old that things are better than they were in 1986 is not an economic programme.

"Young Ugandans are right to demand the mile.

But they should also understand how we got the inch...

The NRM should not expect eternal gratitude for restoring security and rebuilding the economy. Equally, younger Ugandans should resist the idea that today’s relative stability and abundance simply happened.

They were built.

And they can be destroyed.

The real task now is to preserve the foundations while making sure the prosperity built on them spreads beyond Kampala, beyond the politically connected and beyond the already comfortable.

Because “at least we can sleep” should not be the end of Uganda’s ambition.

But neither should we forget why, once upon a time, being able to sleep was an achievement.

UGANDA TELECOM RACE TIGHTENS

2026-08-27T16:02:00.261+03:00

Uganda’s two listed telecom companies turned in strong first-half 2026 results, but beneath the headline growth numbers an increasingly interesting contest is taking shape.

MTN Uganda remains comfortably larger in revenue, customers, profit and dividends. Airtel Uganda, however, grew its underlying operating earnings faster, widened margins and, significantly, generated more data revenue than MTN despite having a smaller overall customer and revenue base.

For the six months to June, MTN reported total revenue of UGX1.888 trillion, 9.7 percent higher than a year earlier, while Airtel’s revenue increased 10.2 percent to UGX1.195 trillion. MTN generated EBITDA of UGX967.5 billion and profit after tax of UGX367.5 billion compared with Airtel’s UGX643.5 billion and UGX224.7 billion respectively.

Financial summary

H1 2026	MTN Uganda	Airtel Uganda
Total revenue	UGX1.888tn	UGX1.195tn
Revenue growth	9.7%	10.2%
EBITDA	UGX967.5bn	UGX643.5bn
EBITDA growth	4.7%	13.4%
EBITDA margin	51.2%	53.9%
Profit after tax	UGX367.5bn	UGX224.7bn
PAT growth	37.7%	13.9%
PAT margin	19.5%	18.8%
Voice revenue	UGX640.4bn	UGX549.5bn
Data revenue	UGX566.8bn	UGX610.6bn
Reported customers	25.4m	19.7m
Capex excluding leases	UGX317.7bn	UGX160.5bn
H1 EPS	UGX16.40	UGX5.60
Annualised H1 EPS	UGX32.80	UGX11.20
Share price, Aug. 26	UGX435.28	UGX171.02
Indicative P/E	13.3x	15.3x
Indicative PEG	0.35	1.10
H1 dividends declared	UGX386.2bn	UGX196bn

MTN reported basic earnings per share of UGX16.40, up from UGX11.90 in H1 2025, while Airtel reported EPS of UGX5.60, against UGX4.90 a year earlier.

For valuation purposes, annualising those half-year earnings gives indicative EPS of UGX32.80 for MTN and UGX11.20 for Airtel. Using their August 26 USE closing prices of UGX435.28 and UGX171.02 respectively gives approximate P/E ratios of 13.3 times for MTN and 15.3 times for Airtel. The share-price data comes from market quotations rather than the companies’ financial statements. (MarketScreener UAE Emirates)

Applying the respective H1 PAT growth rates to those P/E multiples produces indicative PEG ratios of 0.35 for MTN and 1.10 for Airtel. On that simple measure, MTN looks considerably cheaper for the earnings growth being delivered.

But the comparison needs qualification.

MTN’s spectacular 37.7 percent increase in PAT benefited substantially from a 43.1 percent reduction in its tax charge because the comparative period included a once-off transfer-pricing settlement. At the operating level, EBIT increased only 0.2 percent.

That means the 0.35 PEG probably flatters MTN if the current profit growth rate cannot be repeated. Airtel’s 13.9 percent PAT growth was less dramatic but was supported by stronger operating momentum: EBITDA increased 13.4 percent and the EBITDA margin expanded from 52.3 percent to 53.9 percent.

In that sense, MTN looks cheaper on headline valuation, while Airtel’s earnings growth currently looks cleaner.

Airtel wins the data round

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the numbers is data.

Airtel generated UGX610.6 billion in data revenue, up 16.1 percent, compared with MTN’s UGX566.8 billion, up 15.6 percent. Airtel therefore generated about UGX44 billion more from data despite its smaller total revenue base.

Data now represents 51.1 percent of Airtel’s service revenue, up from 48.8 percent a year earlier. Its data customer base grew 18.8 percent to 8.9 million, data usage per customer increased 21 percent and total network data traffic jumped 42.1 percent.

MTN actually reports more active data customers — 12.6 million — but its revenue mix is much broader. Data accounts for about 30.4 percent of service revenue because MTN has another enormous growth engine: fintech.

Fintech revenue increased 10.7 percent to UGX580.6 billion, almost matching data revenue. Active fintech customers increased 11.5 percent to 14.8 million while transaction values surged 26.8 percent to UGX113.3 trillion.

This is arguably MTN’s biggest strategic advantage. Airtel’s Uganda results do not provide a directly comparable mobile-money revenue figure, so the two companies cannot be compared cleanly on fintech from the published numbers.

Margin battle favours Airtel

Another notable divergence is cost efficiency.

MTN’s service revenue rose 9.4 percent but expenses climbed 15.1 percent. EBITDA therefore increased only 4.7 percent and its margin fell from 53.7 percent to 51.2 percent.

Airtel went the other way. Expenses increased only 6.6 percent against revenue growth of 10.2 percent, allowing EBITDA to grow 13.4 percent and margins to expand.

This is why Airtel arguably had the better operating half even though MTN made significantly more money.

Both companies are also spending heavily to protect future growth. MTN invested UGX317.7 billion excluding leases, up 44.6 percent, while Airtel spent UGX160.5 billion, an 82.9 percent increase. MTN raised its 4G population coverage to 93.3 percent and 5G coverage to 25.6 percent.

Airtel rolled out 494 4G sites, 384 5G sites and 1,621 kilometres of fibre and says all its sites are now 4G-enabled. It is also testing direct-to-cell technology with Starlink.

For income investors, MTN remains the heavier cash payer. It declared UGX386.2 billion, equivalent to UGX17.25 per share, in H1 dividends compared with Airtel’s UGX196 billion, or UGX4.90 per share.

So who is ahead?

MTN remains the stronger franchise by scale, absolute profitability, fintech depth and dividend capacity. Airtel currently has the edge in data revenue growth, EBITDA growth and operating-margin momentum.

For investors, the valuation adds another twist. MTN trades at the lower indicative P/E and dramatically lower headline PEG, but part of that advantage comes from a tax-related earnings boost unlikely to recur indefinitely. Airtel is more expensive relative to reported growth, but its improvement is more visibly rooted in operations.

The race is therefore no longer simply about subscriber numbers. Uganda’s next telecom battle will be fought over data consumption, fibre, 5G, home broadband, digital finance and, ultimately, which operator can turn Uganda’s accelerating digital adoption into the highest sustainable return for shareholders.

MUSK, MARKETS AND THE EXPORT TEST

2026-08-25T08:12:02.390+03:00

I have just finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk and came away with mixed emotions — awe at what one man has achieved in a lifetime and some horror at the person he appears to have had to become to achieve it.

Musk is only a few months older than me. That makes the reading uncomfortable.

Isaacson portrays a man of extraordinary imagination, risk tolerance and focus, but also one who can be abrasive, insensitive and brutally demanding. Employees, friends and even family can become collateral damage to the mission.

No candidate for beatification here.

Isaacson, who also wrote the excellent biography of Steve Jobs, has a rare ability to get behind the caricature served up by the media and ferret out what drives his subjects. Yet despite the book running to hundreds of pages, I finished it feeling he had only scratched the surface of Musk’s complicated personality and even more audacious vision.

Tesla was the announcement

SpaceX can only be described in superlatives. Reusable rockets have changed the economics of going into space.

But for me Tesla is what announced Musk to the world as a bona fide genius.

Starting a new automobile company is close to madness. Cars require huge amounts of capital, complicated supply chains, technology, distribution networks and consumer trust.

Tesla did not merely survive.

It made electric cars desirable and forced virtually every major car manufacturer to rethink its future. Then it pushed into batteries, software and autonomous driving. I cannot wait to own a genuinely self-driving car — Tesla or otherwise.

And then came the ultimate capitalist validation: the market.

Investors valued Tesla above several of the world’s largest traditional car manufacturers combined.

You can argue they are wrong. You can argue Tesla is overvalued.

But they are putting their own money behind that judgement.

For us free-market adherents, that is the holy grail.

Yes, government helped

Tesla’s rise was not a pure free-market fairy tale.

It benefited from government support, including a $465 million US government loan, which it repaid early. America also protects its industries; Chinese EVs face punitive tariffs in the US market.

So yes, protectionism and state support are part of the story.

But there is an important distinction.

At its best, state support helps a company become strong enough to compete globally. It does not permanently shield it from competition...

You can provide finance, infrastructure, research support and even temporary protection.

But eventually the company must leave the nursery and fight.

The export market is brutal.

That brutality is useful.

Then came BYD

Some will say it is unfair to compare Uganda’s Kiira Motors with Tesla.

I think the opposite.

Who exactly are we supposed to compare it with?

When Kiira sells a bus in Nairobi, Lagos, Dar es Salaam or Johannesburg, the buyer will not lower his expectations because Uganda is a developing country.

He will compare price, reliability, range, financing, technology and after-sales service against every available alternative.

And increasingly that means China.

In fact Tesla may now be the kinder comparison. BYD sold more fully electric vehicles than Tesla in 2025 and is also a major global electric-bus manufacturer.

That is the market Kiira Motors is entering.

Like it or not, Tesla and BYD are the competition.

The import-substitution trap

This is also why I have always been suspicious of import substitution.

There is nothing wrong with producing at home what we currently import. The problem starts when import substitution becomes a policy for protecting companies from competition rather than preparing them for it...

Then the incentives turn upside down.

Instead of becoming more efficient, the company learns to lobby government. Instead of improving its product, it seeks tariffs, tax breaks, procurement preferences and protection from foreign competitors.

That is how cronies are created.

And once protected firms are guaranteed a market, innovation suffers. Why improve quality or lower prices when the customer has nowhere else to go?

The taxpayer becomes a double loser.

First, billions of shillings can disappear into enterprises that never become commercially viable.

Then the same taxpayer, now acting as a consumer, pays again through higher prices, poorer quality or inferior services because competition has been suppressed...

Export-led growth imposes a much healthier discipline.

The Kenyan, Nigerian or South African buyer does not care who your minister is. He does not care how patriotic your industrial policy sounds.

He wants value.

Politicians love inputs

This brings us back to Kiira Motors.

Politicians love inputs.

We allocated billions. We built a factory. We installed a production line. We trained engineers. We made a bus.

Cut ribbon. Take photographs. Mission accomplished.

Except business does not work like that.

The private sector is judged by outputs and outcomes because the market is an unforgiving auditor.

How many buses did you make? How many did you sell? At what margin? Did customers return? Can you export? Can you finance the next production cycle from revenues rather than another government appropriation?

The issue is not whether Ugandans can build buses.

Obviously we can.

The issue is whether we can build buses that strangers will buy with their own money.

That is a completely different test.

If Kiira can sell hundreds and eventually thousands of buses across Africa against BYD and other manufacturers, government should back it enthusiastically.

But if after hundreds of billions of shillings we are still mainly celebrating factories, prototypes and government procurement, we should ask whether that capital might produce higher returns elsewhere.

Musk’s story reinforced something very simple.

Capitalism does not care about good intentions.

Eventually somebody who does not have to buy your product must reach into his pocket and pay for it.

Tesla passed that test.

BYD has passed it on an even larger scale.

Kiira Motors must too.

UGANDA'S POWER SECTOR: STRONG FOUNDATIONS, DANGEROUS NEW STRESSES

2026-08-18T09:43:58.340+03:00

Uganda’s electricity sector is at an inflection point. For the last two decades, it has been one of the country’s better reform stories. Generation capacity expanded, private capital came in, electricity losses fell, regulation improved, and the country moved away from the crippling shortages that once made load-shedding a normal part of business life.

But the next phase may be harder than the last. The easy story of reform is over. The harder story of expansion, credibility and execution has begun.

Saidi Bukenya, whose company Energy Development in Africa has been involved in developing several private electricity generation projects in Uganda and is now looking at transmission, argues that the public debate may be behind the reality on the ground.

The first issue is generation. The popular assumption has been that with Karuma fully onstream, Uganda has surplus power to spare. But Bukenya warns that this comfort is misplaced...

“We don’t have a surplus,” Bukenya said. “We are not meeting our demand.”

That is a sobering claim. For years, the fear was that Uganda had built too much generation ahead of demand. Now the warning from inside the sector is that demand, especially from industry and growing domestic consumption, is already eating into available supply. Infrastructure behaves like this. A road creates traffic. A trading centre creates shops. Electricity lines create factories, welders, cold rooms, agro-processors and households that begin to consume power in ways planners often underestimate.

This means Uganda cannot wait for a crisis before planning the next generation projects. Power plants take years to prepare, finance, procure and build. By the time the public notices shortages, it is already too late. The decision to slow down large generation because of fears of excess capacity may have looked prudent at one point, but development has a way of consuming yesterday’s surplus.

“What we need is one or two big generation projects, not the small ones,” Bukenya said.

In his view, Uganda now needs sizeable generation projects of about 500 MW to 600 MW if the country is to stay ahead of demand. This does not mean Uganda should build recklessly. The Bujagali and Karuma experiences show that generation choices are politically, financially and technically complex. Private capital can be expensive, but public debt is not free either. Government-built projects may offer more control, but they add pressure to the national balance sheet. Privately financed projects require returns that reflect risk, but they also move part of the burden away from the taxpayer.

The second issue is transmission. Generation without transmission is stranded value. Uganda needs to move power from where it is generated to where it is consumed, and that requires heavy investment in lines, substations and grid stability. This is where the old assumption that transmission must remain a purely government activity is beginning to look outdated.

“Government needs $3b to $5b in investment in transmission; surely they cannot borrow all that money,” Bukenya said.

This is the heart of the matter. Uganda’s power ambitions now exceed what the public balance sheet can comfortably carry. The government can continue to own and regulate the backbone of the system, but it may have to accept more private participation in transmission if the grid is to expand at the speed required by industrialisation.

The case for private transmission is not ideological. It is practical. Private developers can sometimes move faster than public procurement systems, raise long-term capital, accept performance obligations and reduce the delays that have become so costly in public infrastructure. The challenge is to design contracts that are transparent, fairly priced and firmly regulated.

The third issue is distribution after Umeme. Whatever one thinks of Umeme politically, the concession solved real sector problems. It reduced losses, improved collections, attracted investment and helped make the electricity value chain more bankable. Its exit has brought distribution back into government hands through UEDCL.

Bukenya gives UEDCL some credit. He says the new public distributor appears to be collecting revenue well and may be more responsive in some areas. But he also raises concerns over technical losses, the speed of new investment and delayed remittances to the transmission utility.

That last point is critical. Electricity is a chain. If the distributor collects but delays remitting to transmission, transmission delays payments to generators, and generators begin to worry about the bankability of the sector. Investor confidence is not built by speeches. It is built by invoices paid on time.

The fourth issue is regulation, where Uganda still has a major advantage. Uganda’s electricity regulator is one of the strongest on the continent, credited with predictability and professionalism. This matters because electricity investors do not only look at demand. They look at rules, tariff predictability, payment discipline and whether contracts survive political pressure.

But even strong regulation will be tested by the politics of cheap power. The ambition to lower tariffs for manufacturers is understandable. Uganda cannot industrialise on expensive electricity. But tariffs must fall because of better planning, lower losses, cheaper finance, higher demand density and efficient procurement — not because the government wishes them down. Artificially cheap power eventually becomes expensive power, paid through arrears, subsidies, shortages or underinvestment.

Uganda’s power sector is therefore not in crisis, but it is entering a danger zone. Its foundations are stronger than those of many African markets. Demand exists. Regulation is credible. Private capital is interested. But the sector now needs speed, honesty and discipline: speed in generation and transmission planning, honesty about the end of the surplus narrative, and discipline in collections, remittances and tariffs.

The next electricity story will not be about escaping darkness. It will be about whether Uganda can build a power system big, reliable and affordable enough to carry industrialisation. That is a much harder assignment.

STANBIC'S PROFIT MACHINE SHIFTS UP A GEAR

2026-08-17T12:30:23.914+03:00

Stanbic Uganda Holdings Limited (SUHL) posted a 28.2% increase in profit after tax to UShs357 billion for the six months to June 2026, from UShs278.4 billion in the corresponding period last year, powered by strong growth in both interest and non-interest income and a turnaround in credit impairment charges.

The numbers suggest that Uganda’s largest financial services group is getting more earnings out of a rapidly expanding balance sheet while keeping costs from rising as quickly as revenues.

Total income before credit impairments rose 21.2% to UShs830.3 billion, compared with UShs685.2 billion a year earlier. Net interest income increased 16.7% to UShs433.6 billion, supported by balance-sheet growth, while non-interest revenue jumped 26.4% to UShs396.6 billion, driven mainly by trading income.

Management said revenues grew 21.2% against a 14% increase in costs, producing positive jaws of 7.2 percentage points. Non-interest revenue now contributes 47.8% of total revenue, up from 45.8% a year earlier, pointing to a more diversified earnings base.

Another significant lift came from credit impairments. SUHL recorded a UShs14.6 billion net impairment release, compared with a UShs7.3 billion charge in H1 2025. Management attributed this to continued improvement in the asset book and recoveries on loans previously written off.

That swing of almost UShs22 billion helped profit before tax rise 34.3% to UShs477.1 billion.

The stronger earnings also translated into improved returns. Return on average equity climbed to 30.4% from 26.9%, while the cost-to-income ratio improved to 44.3% from 47.1%. The credit loss ratio moved to negative 0.5% from 0.2%, although non-performing loans edged up slightly to 1.5% from 1.3%.

Stanbic H1 financials (all in Ugshs) at a glance

Indicator	H1 2026	H1 2025	Change
Profit after tax	356.8bn	278.4bn	+28.2%
Profit before tax	477.1bn	355.2bn	+34.3%
Total income	830.3bn	685.2bn	+21.2%
Net interest income	433.6bn	371.5bn	+16.7%
Non-interest revenue	396.6bn	313.7bn	+26.4%
Customer loans	5.35tn	4.94tn	+8.2%
Customer deposits	9.24tn	8.44tn	+9.4%
Total assets	13.43tn	11.80tn	+13.9%
Shareholders’ equity	2.51tn	2.18tn	+15.3%
ROE	30.4%	26.9%	+3.5pp

The balance sheet continued to bulk up. Total assets increased 13.9% to UShs13.4 trillion, customer deposits grew 9.4% to UShs9.2 trillion and net customer loans rose 8.2% to UShs5.35 trillion. Shareholders’ equity increased 15.3% to UShs2.51 trillion.

And shareholders are getting a bigger slice of the action.

The board approved an interim dividend of UShs220 billion, equivalent to UShs4.30 per share, subject to regulatory approval. This compares with an interim dividend provision of UShs140 billion at the same stage last year—an increase of 57.1%.
The dividend is therefore growing roughly twice as fast as profits. The proposed payout amounts to about 62% of first-half earnings, compared with about 50% in H1 2025.

For shareholders, that is perhaps the most interesting number of all: Stanbic is not only making substantially more money; it is increasingly passing that money through to its owners while still growing deposits, lending, assets and capital.

That is a profit machine shifting up a gear.

UGANDA CAN’T BUILD A $500B ECONOMY ONE PLOT AT A TIME

2026-08-11T08:27:08.794+03:00

For decades, Uganda’s housing strategy has been simple: leave it to the individual.

A Ugandan buys a 50-by-100-foot plot beyond the city and builds slowly. First the foundation, then the walls. The roof may come two years later. Windows and doors follow when other obligations allow.

This model has produced millions of homes. But individual development has reached its limit and is failing to keep pace with urbanisation.

That came into focus during a post-budget dialogue on decent housing hosted by the Uganda Society of Architects. Participants asked whether the national budget and Uganda’s institutions are responding adequately.

The numbers suggest they are not.

"Uganda’s urban population is growing by more than five percent annually. The industry delivers about 60,000 housing units a year against estimated demand of 344,000...

The country already has a housing deficit of about 2.4 million units, projected to rise to 4.5 million by 2035.

No number of individuals laying one brick at a time can keep pace.

The market worked—up to a point

This column has argued that government’s dismal of some people’s clamouring for rent controls was coreect.

Capping rents and restricting advances would have discouraged investment. Less investment would reduce rental supply and eventually push rents higher—the opposite of what the regulations intended.

As private investment increased, landlords who once demanded a year’s rent in advance began accepting six months, three months and, in some places, one month. Competition was improving the terms.

Dollar rents and punitive advances were symptoms of scarcity. Where demand exceeded supply, landlords held all the cards. Increase supply and power shifts towards tenants.

That logic remains valid. But markets regulate prices only when supply can respond.

Uganda’s individual builder has run into expensive land, costly infrastructure, high taxes, uncertain tenure, short-term finance and fragmented planning.

The next phase of urbanisation cannot be built one plot at a time.

The five-dollar opportunity

This is not only a social challenge. It is a major economic opportunity.

Government wants to grow Uganda’s economy tenfold to about $500 billion by 2040. Real estate should be one of the principal engines of that ambition.

Using the sector’s commonly cited multiplier, every dollar invested in real estate can generate about five dollars in wider economic activity.

A housing project employs professionals, artisans and labourers. It buys local materials and creates business for transporters, banks, insurers, hardware shops and furniture makers. Once occupied, it generates demand for utilities, schools, retail and transport.

"Housing construction has a high employment multiplier, uses substantial domestic materials and can mobilise household savings into long-term productive investment...

Housing is not merely where people sleep. It is an economic production line.

Government has made housing expensive

Government cannot demand affordable housing while making development unaffordable.

Roads, drainage, electricity, water, sewerage and other public goods can account for about 40 percent of development costs. Yet developers are expected to provide them and recover the expense from buyers or tenants.

Residential developers also pay 18 percent VAT on building materials. Because residential sales are generally exempt, that input VAT is not recoverable and becomes a permanent cost.

On sh100 million worth of taxable materials, sh18 million is added before land, finance, labour, professional fees and profit.

Government then wonders why developers build for the wealthy.

About 76 percent of Ugandans can afford homes valued at only sh12 million to sh24 million, while a formal starter house costs about sh150 million. An estimated 96 percent cannot afford the cheapest standard house produced by formal developers.

That is not merely an affordability gap. It is a market-design failure.

A private house, a communal asset

"Housing must stop being treated as merely a private responsibility.

It is a public obligation, an economic necessity and increasingly a security and safety issue...

Unplanned urbanisation produces flooding, congestion, crime and unsafe settlements. Factories appear next to homes. Roads and drainage arrive only after thousands have settled.

The house may be privately owned, but much of its value is communal. It comes from roads, drainage, sewerage, electricity, schools, security and orderly land use.

Uganda needs more housing cooperatives, condominiums, land pooling and public land banking. Neighbouring landowners should combine plots rather than develop independently.

Zoning must also be enforced. Productive cities cannot emerge where factories, schools, warehouses and residences are mixed without regard to safety or infrastructure.

Government must become a participant

Government must move beyond being a catalytic agent.

It should become a direct participant—not necessarily by laying every brick, but by assembling land, installing infrastructure, supplying patient capital, guaranteeing projects and partnering with institutional developers.

Resolving the uncertainty around Libya’s shareholding in National Housing and Construction Corporation is central to this shift. The dispute has constrained government’s ability to recapitalise NHCC and use it as a national housing-delivery vehicle.

Once resolved, NHCC should develop serviced land, rental housing, apartments and affordable units in the tens of thousands, not a few hundred expensive houses.

There are encouraging signs. Government has capitalised Uganda Development Bank by about sh1.6 trillion over five years and earmarked another sh440 billion, some of which is expected to support real estate developers.

But the scale must be greater.

Uganda’s commercial banks cannot finance this transformation alone. A single development may require sh80 billion, forcing banks to syndicate.

The country needs housing bonds, mortgage refinancing, pension-fund participation and specialised long-term finance.

"Tax relief should expand supply rather than subsidise individual buyers. Government can service land, reduce taxes on affordable-housing inputs and support developers capable of producing thousands of units.

The Uganda Society of Architects’ post-budget dialogue was about whether Uganda understands that real estate is also a growth, productivity, safety and national-development issue.

To build a $500 billion economy, Uganda must start building at institutional scale.

MTN UGANDA H1 PROFIT JUMPS 38 PCT TO SHS367.5b

2026-08-07T17:18:49.767+03:00

MTN Uganda’s profit after tax jumped 37.7 percent to Shs367.5 billion in the first half of 2026, from Shs267.0 billion in the corresponding period last year, helped by growth in data and mobile money revenues and a significantly lower tax charge.

Total revenue increased 9.7 percent to Shs1.89 trillion from Shs1.72 trillion, while service revenue grew 9.4 percent to Shs1.87 trillion. Data revenue rose 15.6 percent to Shs566.8 billion and fintech revenue increased 10.7 percent to Shs580.6 billion. Voice revenue grew more modestly, up 1.8 percent to Shs640.4 billion.

“MTN Uganda delivered a solid performance in the first half of 2026, with improving momentum in the second quarter, as the business recovered from the disruptions experienced earlier in the year,” MTN Uganda Chief Executive Officer Sylvia Mulinge said.

MTN Uganda H1 financial summary

Financial indicator	H1 2026	H1 2025	Change
Total revenue	Shs1.888tn	Shs1.722tn	+9.7%
Service revenue	Shs1.866tn	Shs1.705tn	+9.4%
Data revenue	Shs566.8bn	Shs490.2bn	+15.6%
Voice revenue	Shs640.4bn	Shs629.0bn	+1.8%
Fintech revenue	Shs580.6bn	Shs524.6bn	+10.7%
EBITDA	Shs967.5bn	Shs924.2bn	+4.7%
EBITDA margin	51.2%	53.7%	-2.5pp
Profit before tax	Shs525.1bn	Shs543.8bn	-3.4%
Profit after tax	Shs367.5bn	Shs267.0bn	+37.7%
PAT margin	19.5%	15.5%	+4.0pp
Capex	Shs455.1bn	Shs279.7bn	+62.7%
Earnings per share	Shs16.4	Shs11.9	+37.8%

MTN’s EBITDA grew 4.7 percent to Shs967.5 billion, although its EBITDA margin narrowed to 51.2 percent from 53.7 percent as total expenses increased 15.1 percent. The margin nevertheless remained above the company’s medium-term target of 50 percent.

The strong PAT growth came despite profit before tax declining 3.4 percent to Shs525.1 billion from Shs543.8 billion. MTN said its tax charge fell 43.1 percent, reflecting the effect of a one-off transfer-pricing settlement in the previous year. The lower tax expense helped lift the net profit margin to 19.5 percent from 15.5 percent.

The company continued to benefit from increased use of data and digital financial services. Its overall subscriber base rose 11.2 percent to 25.4 million, while active data subscribers increased 16.3 percent to 12.6 million and fintech users grew 11.5 percent to 14.8 million.

Mobile money transaction volumes increased 9.5 percent to 2.6 billion transactions, while their value jumped 26.8 percent to Shs113.3 trillion. MTN's fintech agent network grew 23.8 percent to 270,500.

Investment also accelerated sharply during the period. Capital expenditure increased 62.7 percent to Shs455.1 billion, while capex excluding leases rose 44.6 percent to Shs317.7 billion. MTN deployed 224 network sites, increasing 4G population coverage to 93.3 percent from 88.2 percent and 5G coverage to 25.6 percent from 19 percent.

Shs8.75 dividend declared

The stronger earnings will translate into another payout to shareholders. MTN Uganda’s board declared a Q2 2026 interim dividend of Shs8.75 per share, equivalent to Shs195.9 billion.

The latest declaration takes total dividends for the first half of 2026 to Shs17.25 per share, or Shs386.2 billion. MTN said the payout reflected the strength of its earnings, cash generation and balance sheet.

The book closure date is September 1, 2026, while the dividend will be paid on Friday, September 18, 2026, subject to withholding tax. Payments will be transferred electronically to shareholders’ bank accounts or mobile money wallets.

Looking ahead, MTN maintained its medium-term guidance for upper-teen service revenue growth, EBITDA margins above 50 percent and capex intensity in the mid-teens as it continues investing in network capacity and expanding its fintech business.

ITS NOT THE ECONOMY, ITS LACK OF HOSPITALITY

2026-08-04T10:11:55.881+03:00

BOOK REVIEW: UNREASONABLE HOSPITALITY: THE REMARKABLE POWER OF GIVING PEOPLE MORE THAN THEY EXPECT

Author: Will Guidara

Years ago, I walked into a restaurant and ordered a meal.

The waitress took my order and disappeared. Twenty minutes later, there was no food. Another waiter assured me it was coming. Fifteen minutes later, the original waitress returned and explained, without irony, that the person responsible for making my dish had gone somewhere.

Apparently, in a restaurant full of waiters, cooks and supervisors, only one human being had been authorised by the gods to make a grilled chicken breast.

I left without eating.

The owner probably went home and complained that business was slow because the economy was bad.

This is one of our favourite explanations for poor business performance. Customers have no money. Taxes are too high. Government is not helping. Interest rates are punishing.

All may be true. But sometimes it is not the economy that is wanting. It is your customer service.

This is the central lesson I took from Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality

. Guidara built his career in New York’s restaurant industry, but this is not really a book about restaurants. It is about business, leadership and making people feel seen...

You may run a bank, clinic, garage, supermarket, law firm, school or government office. The product may change, but the question remains: how do people feel after dealing with you?

Guidara’s restaurant sought greatness not simply by serving good food, but by creating a culture of connection, graciousness and belonging. The aim was to make employees and customers feel valued.

When products are similar and prices easily compared, customer experience becomes a competitive advantage. Customers may forget the interest rate you quoted or the flavour of the sauce. They will remember how your organisation made them feel...

Ugandan businesses frequently invest heavily in appearances and poorly in experience.

We import furniture, install shiny tiles and dress staff in smart uniforms. Then the receptionist scrolls through her phone while a customer waits. Calls go unanswered. Complaints are treated as acts of aggression.

Guidara distinguishes between luxury and hospitality. Luxury means giving people more. Hospitality means being more thoughtful.

A roadside restaurant can therefore offer better hospitality than an expensive hotel. It may remember your name and prepare your food the way you like it. The hotel may have chandeliers and a receptionist trained to avoid eye contact.

It is answering the phone, keeping a promise and explaining a delay before the customer asks. It is noticing that an elderly client should not stand in a queue. It is empowering an employee to solve a small problem without seeking permission from seven supervisors.

One of the book’s most useful ideas is Guidara’s test for organisational rules: does the rule bring the business closer to connecting with people, or take it further away?

Many rules are designed for the institution’s convenience, not the customer’s.

The customer must photocopy a document already in the company’s system. The client travels across town to sign a form that could have been emailed. The cashier cannot correct a mistake because the supervisor is at lunch.

Every employee may have followed procedure. The customer has still been lost.

Guidara does not argue that hospitality should replace commercial discipline. He insists on understanding the business, setting standards and holding people accountable.

His formula is memorable: manage 95 percent of the business carefully, then use the remaining five percent to do something memorable.

That five percent is not permission to waste money. It creates room for initiative—to surprise a customer, solve a problem or turn an ordinary transaction into a story the customer will repeat.

A delighted customer brings friends.

The book also contains a lesson many businesses resist: the customer’s perception is the organisation’s reality...

When customers complain, our instinct is to defend ourselves. We explain that the system was down, the supplier delayed or the manager was unavailable.

These explanations may be accurate. They do not change the customer’s experience.

Guidara observes that people often want to be heard more than agreed with. Saying sorry is not necessarily an admission of fault. It acknowledges a poor experience.

Unreasonable Hospitality is not perfect. Many examples come from elite New York restaurants, far removed from the average Ugandan business. Some gestures are difficult to reproduce.

But the principles travel well.

Pay attention. Train your people. Listen. Keep your promises. Sweat the small details. Give employees authority to solve problems.

The Ugandan economy will never be perfect. Taxes will remain a complaint. Customers will want lower prices. Competition will intensify.

But even in a difficult economy, money continues to change hands.

The question is whether it will change hands in your business.

UGANDA'S PEARL BANK AT ONE: NOW COMES THE REAL WORK

2026-07-28T09:31:11.048+03:00

A year ago, PostBank became Pearl Bank.

For many, it was a branding event. New name. New colours. New signage.

But in Uganda’s banking history, the consumer usually notices change before the policy people do.

There was a time when banking was what happened before lunch. Then Greenland Bank opened beyond lunchtime and on Saturdays. Suddenly, the customer mattered.

Then came the ATM. Online banking moved the branch from the high street to the desktop and later to the phone. Then mobile money arrived and blew up the old assumptions altogether.

Electronic money transactions in Uganda rose 28 percent from sh285.9 trillion in 2024 to sh366 trillion in 2025. Uganda’s nominal GDP is about sh250.4 trillion. In other words, more money now moves through digital rails than the economy produces in a year.

That is the world into which Pearl Bank has been reborn.

"The question is not whether Pearl Bank can become a good bank. The question is whether it can become a strategic bank...

I say this as someone instinctively sceptical of government-owned enterprises. No surprise there. I cut my teeth as a business reporter covering privatisation in the 1990s. We saw what political interference, weak governance, overstaffing and patronage did to state enterprises. By the time many were sold, they were not companies so much as carcasses.

And yet one must be intellectually honest.

Pearl Bank’s numbers suggest government ownership need not automatically mean failure. Last year profit after tax rose 34 percent to sh47.3b. Assets grew 31 percent to sh1.87 trillion. Customer deposits rose 43 percent to sh1.42 trillion. Wendi wallet balances jumped from sh45.5b to sh240.5b, a fivefold surge.

These are not small numbers. They show an institution whose balance sheet is becoming capable of carrying a bigger national assignment.

The trick now is to keep the sharks at bay.

Every successful public institution attracts interests that want to turn it into a feeding trough. The defence is governance: strong board, professional management, disclosure, regulatory vigilance, clear targets and no sacred cows.

This is where Uganda can learn from Asia.

In How Asia Works

, Joe Studwell shows how Japan, South Korea and Taiwan used finance as a tool of national transformation. Japan did not have to own every bank. It incentivised and disciplined banks to support long-term national strategy: build productive capacity, raise exports and earn foreign exchange. Credit was pushed towards national capability...

Uganda needs that discipline.

Pearl Bank can be the tip of the spear in supporting the government’s broader ATMS agenda — agro-industrialisation, tourism development, mineral development, and science, technology and innovation.

But ambition requires capital.

Government can inject capital, but the more interesting possibility is listing Pearl Bank on the Uganda Securities Exchange.

Bank of Baroda had listed before Stanbic, but Stanbic’s listing was a watershed because it allowed ordinary Ugandans to participate in the growth of a bank, not merely queue in one. Stanbic listed at sh70 a share in 2007. Today it trades around sh80. But after bonus issues that effectively multiplied the original holding about ten times, one old sh70 share is worth roughly sh800 before dividends.

Pearl Bank can do the same with an even more national mission. A listing would raise long-term capital, widen ownership and impose market discipline.

Then there is Wendi.

This may yet prove to be Pearl Bank’s most important strategic asset because it sits directly in the mobile money growth trajectory.

Mobile money started as a convenience. Send money home. Pay someone quickly. Avoid the bus park courier. Then it became a payments platform: school fees, utilities, taxes, merchant payments, savings, credit, group collections and cross-border flows.

In less than two decades, the phone has become Uganda’s most important financial access point.

That is the opportunity Wendi must ride.

Wendi is not just another wallet trying to imitate telecom-led mobile money. Properly positioned, it can become the bridge between the velocity of mobile money and the balance sheet strength of a regulated bank.

Mobile money has proved that Ugandans will transact digitally at scale. What remains is to convert that behaviour into savings, credit histories, investable deposits and productive finance. Wendi already has about two million users and wallet balances of sh240.5b. Add more than 13,000 Wendi agents, 59 ATMs, 59 branches and 14 mobile vans, and the possibility becomes clearer...

If Pearl Bank can capture even a small share of the sh366 trillion now moving annually through electronic money rails, retain part of it as savings and intermediate it prudently, it can create a low-cost funding pool for farmers, traders, tourism operators, mineral service providers, innovators and SMEs.

That is how a wallet becomes a development tool.

One year after the rebrand, Pearl Bank deserves to celebrate. But not for too long.

The first year was about identity. The next phase must be about scale, discipline and national impact.

Uganda does not need Pearl Bank merely to be another profitable bank. It needs Pearl Bank to prove that a government-owned financial institution can be commercially disciplined, digitally ambitious, well governed and developmentally useful.

If it can do that, the rebrand will be remembered as the moment Uganda began to build a financial spearhead for its next phase of transformation.