Madness, Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. If that definition holds, then the saga of Uganda Airlines increasingly looks less like a calculated national investment and more like an expensive exercise in institutional denial.
The announcement that the board is advertising for a new chief executive nearly four years after Jennifer Bamuturaki took the reins should therefore come as no shock. It is not a rupture; it is a rhythm. A familiar cycle in which leadership changes are treated as solutions, while the underlying economics of the business remain largely unexamined. Fortunes decline, pressure mounts, a probe is launched, and the organisation responds by changing faces at the top — hoping, once again, for a different result.
The timing of Ms Bamuturaki’s exit is telling. It comes barely weeks after investigators from the Criminal Investigations Directorate, working jointly with the State House Anti-Corruption Unit
, demanded a trove of financial, procurement, and contractual records. These include board-approved business plans, aircraft acquisition documents, and detailed accounts relating to the airline’s most ambitious and capital-intensive venture: the London route. When law-enforcement interest begins to orbit an enterprise so closely, it is rarely about a single individual. It is usually about systems...
The Original Sin: Optimism as Policy
To understand how Uganda Airlines arrived at this juncture, one must return to its revival in 2019. The relaunch was framed as a bold statement of national intent — restoring pride, boosting tourism, and reclaiming airspace surrendered to foreign carriers.
But beneath the symbolism lay a set of assumptions that Shillings & Cents questioned early on and repeatedly thereafter: unrealistic timelines to profitability, underestimation of operating costs, and overconfidence in the ability of a start-up airline to muscle into fiercely competitive routes...
Aviation is not forgiving. Even globally established airlines with scale, alliances, and deep capital buffers struggle to post consistent profits. New entrants bleed first and ask questions later. Yet Uganda Airlines’ original business plans spoke confidently of early break-even points, as though this were a manufacturing plant rather than a high-risk, low-margin service business. Optimism was not merely cultural; it was embedded as policy.
Follow the Money, Not the Rhetoric
Since revival, government has poured close to Shs1 trillion into the airline through direct capitalisation, guarantees, and supplementary budget allocations. As recently as December, Shs696.5 billion was channelled through the Ministry of Works to bolster fleet acquisition as part of a wider Shs1.6 trillion supplementary request. Officials insist this is a long-term investment in connectivity and trade. In theory, that argument holds water. In practice, it requires discipline.
The numbers tell a sobering story. According to the latest Auditor General’s report, Uganda Airlines reduced its net loss marginally from Shs231.58 billion to Shs230.81 billion year-on-year — an improvement of just 0.33 percent. This narrowing was driven largely by a 19.2 percent increase in revenue, itself a function of route expansion and increased capacity. Progress, yes — but of a fragile kind. When losses still run into hundreds of billions, celebrating incremental improvements risks confusing direction with destination.
Governance Matters — Especially in Aviation
Financial strain alone does not doom an airline. Poor governance does.
In August 2022, Parliament’s Committee on Commissions Statutory and State Enterprises revealed that the CEO did not meet the formal qualifications specified in the job description, notably lacking postgraduate training in administration. The defence offered was that experience compensated for academic requirements. Perhaps. But this episode mattered not because of degrees, but because it signalled a broader disregard for process in a business where process is everything.
Airlines live or die on systems — safety protocols, procurement discipline, route analytics, cost control, and compliance. When governance standards are treated as negotiable, risk multiplies quietly until it erupts loudly, often through losses, audits, or investigations. The current scrutiny by CID and SHACU should therefore be read not as an isolated event, but as a symptom of deeper institutional fragility.
Expansion Is Not the Sin — Unexamined Assumptions Are
It is important to state this clearly: an airline does not need to be profitable before expanding its network. That would be an impossible standard in an industry where even the best operators invest ahead of returns. Expansion can, under the right conditions, be part of the path toward sustainability.
The problem with Uganda Airlines is not expansion itself, but the quality and opacity, of the assumptions used to justify that expansion.
Every route is a bet. A bet on passenger volumes, yields, cargo uplift, and the airline’s ability to attract and retain traffic in the face of formidable competition. Those bets must be grounded in rigorous market data and honest stress-testing. Without that discipline, expansion becomes faith-based economics...
Consider the London route. This is not just another destination; it is the airline’s flagship statement. London is a mature, brutally competitive market dominated by carriers with deep networks, strong brands, and aggressive pricing strategies. Success on this route depends on sustained marketing, corporate travel contracts, diaspora loyalty translated into repeat business, and seamless connectivity.
If an airline struggles to consistently market and fill its London flights, no amount of optimism will magically make the Riyadh route profitable.
This is not cynicism; it is arithmetic. Routes do not become viable because they are announced at press conferences. They become viable because demand exists at the right price and because the airline can capture that demand efficiently. If the most obvious, diaspora-rich route is underperforming, prudence demands a pause — not a sprint into additional long-haul destinations on the assumption that “the next one will work”.
What assumptions underpin Riyadh, Muscat, Accra, or Gwangju? Are we betting on labour traffic, religious travel, cargo contracts, or transit passengers? And are these flows backed by firm data and commercial agreements, or inferred from hopeful correlations? In aviation, scale can lower unit costs — but it can also magnify losses if demand projections disappoint.
The Expansion Trap
Uganda Airlines’ repeated announcements of new aircraft and new routes create the appearance of momentum. But motion is not the same as progress. Adding aircraft increases fixed costs immediately — crew, maintenance, insurance, fuel, and ground handling, while revenues take time to materialise, if they do at all. Without disciplined sequencing, expansion simply widens the loss profile.
This is where the airline risks falling into a familiar trap: mistaking growth for success. Expanding before optimising existing routes is like building additional lanes on a road whose traffic patterns are poorly understood. More asphalt does not fix congestion if the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
The Hidden Cost: Opportunity Lost
Every shilling invested in Uganda Airlines carries an opportunity cost. Public capital is finite. Close to Shs1 trillion sunk into aviation could have funded agricultural productivity, vocational skills, SME finance, or export-oriented manufacturing, sectors that employ far more Ugandans per shilling spent.
Tourism, often cited as the airline’s justification, does not depend solely on owning aircraft. Tourists arrive because destinations are competitive, safe, affordable, and well-marketed. There are cheaper and often more effective ways to improve connectivity: code-sharing agreements, route incentives for foreign carriers, and rationalisation of aviation taxes that make Entebbe more attractive as a hub.
So What Must Change?
Advertising for a new CEO is the easy part. The harder task is structural reform.
Uganda Airlines needs a brutally honest reset: transparent route-level economics, publicly articulated performance benchmarks, and a governance framework insulated from political interference. Expansion should remain an option but only when justified by clear data and sequenced prudently. Above all, expectations must be recalibrated. Losses are not temporary irritants to be explained away; they are signals to be interrogated.
Conclusion: From Hope to Hard Choices
Uganda Airlines still has potential. It has assets, a growing brand, and a strategic position in a region with rising demand for air travel. But potential is not performance. And national pride, while emotionally resonant, does not pay lease rentals or fuel bills.
Unless prudence replaces hope as the organising principle — unless assumptions are challenged as rigorously as ambitions are proclaimed, the airline risks repeating its cycle: expansion, losses, leadership change, and renewed appeals to the taxpayer. That is not nation-building. It is expensive repetition.
And repetition, as we have been reminded, is only madness when we expect a different result.
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