For nearly ten years, a Presidential directive meant to transform Uganda’s industrial landscape has gathered dust and the latest Auditor General’s report lays the blame squarely at the door of the Uganda Investment Authority (UIA).
In 2016, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni directed UIA to establish 25 regional industrial parks across the country to spur industrialisation, decentralise investment, create jobs, and reduce regional economic inequality.
The directive was ambitious but clear. A decade later, the verdict is damning: not a single one of those industrial parks has been established.
The Auditor General reveals that while UIA mobilised land across several districts tens of thousands of acres in total, the authority failed to translate that effort into actual industrial parks.
The land remains largely idle, offering no factories, no jobs, and no economic value to the communities it was meant to uplift.
This failure is not merely bureaucratic. It strikes at the heart of UIA’s mandate and raises uncomfortable questions about leadership, accountability, and priorities at Uganda’s primary investment promotion agency.
Instead of delivering industrial infrastructure, UIA has spent the past decade battling internal inefficiencies, weak project execution, and poor coordination.
But the Auditor General’s findings also land in the middle of a high-profile power struggle between the institution’s top leadership, a feud that has played out publicly and, critics argue, distracted the authority from its core mission.
At the centre of the storm are UIA Executive Director Robert Mukiza and State Minister for Investment Evelyn Anite, whose relationship has been marked by open confrontation, mutual accusations, and repeated interventions from higher offices.
Their disagreements ranging from management of funds to control of strategic decisions have often overshadowed UIA’s development agenda.
While the two leaders have traded blame, the Auditor General paints a picture of an authority struggling to execute even its most basic obligations. The report highlights failure to develop industrial parks, inadequate infrastructure in existing ones, weak monitoring of investments, and idle public assets vulnerable to encroachment.
The unimplemented directive is particularly striking given its national importance. Regional industrial parks were intended to take factories closer to farmers, youth, and entrepreneurs in upcountry Uganda.
Their absence has meant lost opportunities, stalled regional growth, and continued overconcentration of industry in a few urban centres.
The report warns that failure to act has not only delayed economic transformation but also weakened investor confidence and undermined government credibility.
When presidential directives remain unimplemented for a decade, it signals a deeper institutional problem one where authority, responsibility, and results are dangerously misaligned.
In response, the Auditor General calls for urgent action: removal of bottlenecks, dedicated funding, stronger stakeholder engagement, and decisive leadership to finally operationalise industrial parks and restore focus at UIA.
But beyond technical fixes, the report leaves an unavoidable question hanging in the air: how did an agency tasked with driving industrialisation spend ten years mobilising land — yet fail to build even one park while internal leadership wars raged on?
As Uganda pushes toward its industrialisation goals under successive national development plans, the cost of inaction is no longer abstract. It is measured in idle land, lost jobs, frustrated investors, and broken promises.
And after ten years, patience is running out.
