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.

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

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

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.