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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.