#OutToLunch Rising fuel prices can be countered by electric vehicles

By Denis Jjuuko

Fuel is the most common word on people’s lips especially in urban areas where motorized transport is the most used form of movement. Rural areas aren’t spared though. Moving produce to urban areas must be a challenge. Usually, trucks that bring produce to the urban areas return with essentials to the rural areas. Life must be tough everywhere.Some fuel stations in Hoima were said to have sold a litre of petrol at more than Shs10,000.

I think this is the first time since the 2007 elections in Kenya where supply lines to Uganda were cut off due to the post-election violence that erupted that fuel has cost as much as or more than Shs10,000 a litre. This time though, the result isn’t a violence after an election rather our approach to testing drivers for COVID-19.

Truck drivers went on strike than paying what they considered exorbitant rates.In Kampala this week, in the areas where I live, a litre of petrol is going for Shs5,000 and some didn’t even have. At some stations, people end up buying a litre of the premium types at Shs5,190 or more. Some organisations have advised their employees to work from home given the increasing cost of transport.

Although the increment in prices has been solely blamed at the strike by drivers, fuel prices have been on the rise steadily climbing towards the Shs5,000 per a litre mark. I believe regardless of the strike, a litre of petrol will be selling at more than Shs5,000 before the end of 2022. Of the 6.5 million litres of fuel sold in Uganda every day, the majority of it is used in vehicles. This makes everything in the country expensive.Yet there are some solutions that can help address this challenge.

Electrified transport especially in urban areas can lower the cost of doing business. This would call for the deployment of electric buses in the city. You need less than Shs50,000 to charge a bus for 300km. The cost of running a diesel bus covering the same distance in an urban area like Kampala is almost three times more than an electric one. Operators of public transport would actually make more money if they went electric. I have listened to testimonies by Kampala boda bodas who are switching to fully electric motorcycles. They say they make Shs11,000 more every day using electric motorcycles than when they used to operate ordinary motorcycles. That is when there isn’t even a single incentive from government to use cleaner cheaper motorcycles.

Imagine if there were some incentives! How many public transport operators would be using electric vehicles?If enough reliable public buses were deployed in greater Kampala, many of us would abandon our private vehicles as they are costly to operate. Also, most private vehicles carry on average two people and are parked for the greater part of the day. Lack of parking in Kampala is another issue buses would solve.

These buses as we have already seen with Kiira Motors can be locally built thereby not only solving the country’s transport nightmare in urban areas but also creating millions of jobs. Besides public transport, the government should offer incentives for people to buy electric and hybrid vehicles. Such incentives should be in lower import duty and other taxes so that we import less internal combustion vehicles that not only increase the cost of doing business but also destroy the environment.

Not so long ago, Kampala was listed among the most polluted cities in the world. This is a result of our reliance on extremely old vehicles in a congested city.Incentives for charging infrastructure would then also be provided such as tax rebates for fuel stations, hotels, and shopping malls that install car chargers. More incentives can be provided for school shuttles and companies that transport students and workers respectively in electric buses.

Companies can be encouraged to use electric vehicles for their city movement as well. The government can do the same for vehicles that are mainly used for city movement.The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development would then introduce an electric vehicle tariff similar to the newly introduced cooking tariff. You pay less for electricity for charging your vehicle. As fuel prices rise, given our generation capacity, the cost of electricity should be going down.

Today, a big budget of many households in greater Kampala is on transport. Cars are expensive to buy and service and even more expensive to fuel every day. Money saved from transport would boost household incomes leading to more spending in other areas. That is how economies grow.

The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

Tags: Electric Vehicles, Electric vehicles in Uganda, Fuel prices, Kiira Motors Corporation, KMC

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Stronger African economies will create a World Cup winner

By Denis Jjuuko The football World Cup ended recently with Spain lifting the golden trophy after defeating Argentina 1-0 in extra time. This year’s tournament has seen the teams expanded from 32 to 48 of which 10 were from Africa. It is by far the biggest football World Cup ever in nearly 100 years since the competition was first organised in 1930. The organizer, FIFA, is even now talking about further expanding it to 64 national teams. One of the major talking points of the tournament has been the performance of teams from Africa. Only Morocco made it to the quarterfinals. Unlike in the last tournament in 2022 in Qatar, Morocco reached the semifinals. It is the only time an African team had reached that far in the tournament. Countries outside Europe and America didn’t do much either this year. Of the four countries that qualified for the semifinals, only defending champions Argentina is outside Europe. Needless to say, that Argentina was being inspired by Lionel Messi, probably the best player the world has ever seen since Pele and Diego Maradona. Anyway, why don’t African teams perform that well in the World Cup competition yet unlike Asia or the Middle East, football is the most popular sport on the continent? Many young boys on the continent wake up to kick the ball in the streets. Many others try to create professional careers while others watch it for hours on end especially over the weekend. Even though the interest is immense, sports, not just soccer, isn’t considered a major career pathway for many people on the continent. Parents rather push their children into other professional careers than sports. Go to school, get an education, find a job and live a better life thereafter. Sports such as soccer provide very short careers. About 10 years if you are lucky. By the time a player is 30, most likely their career is over. Of course, there are outliers like Messi who is 39 years old and still performing at the top level and Christiano Ronaldo who is 41 years old. But for the majority of players, they don’t stay in the game for that long. Of course, there are other areas in which they can earn after retirement such as coaching, television punditry and podcasting, scouting and even management but the openings are even fewer. Look at the premier league for example, there are only 20 teams and each team has about 30 players, which translates to a paltry 600 players. To make it to the premier league or any of the top leagues in the world is for the exceptional. I think that is why parents usually guide their children away from sports. Besides it is expensive to support a child’s career to develop to a level where he can attract interest of the big highly paying professional leagues. If you are in Africa, the odds are highly against you. Sport is poorly funded. Infrastructure is almost non-existent. A kid with talent needs high quality coaches, kits and infrastructure to make it. Do they exist? Hardly. In many communities, the kids play on bare grounds and in urban areas those grounds are being turned into bland shopping malls. A parent would have to invest in flying a child to European academies to get the best training they need to make it. How many such parents have such resources? And if the kids are good, they would be assimilated in Europe. If you look at the three European countries that reached this year’s semifinals, there are quite a number of immigrants. Some may have been born in Europe, but there are also others who weren’t born there. England’s Marc Guehi was born in Ivory Coast. Of course, north African teams had players born in Europe but usually those are few. And many only chose African teams after failing to impress European countries. We always talk about professionalizing our leagues but it is difficult if the economies are weak. Unless we prioritize developing our economies, African teams will always struggle to win the World Cup. Weak African economies can’t afford to pay top young modern coaches. We end up picking hustlers from eastern Europe or pensioners from western Europe, whose ideas and methods are way past their sell-by dates. Stronger economies would create big companies that can invest in sport as sponsors or even in club ownership (many private equity and hedge funds own clubs in Europe/America for example). Clubs would be able to sell tickets and merchandise at premium rates, develop players they can sell to other clubs in Europe and elsewhere at world market rates and create a sports ecosystem that generates millions of dollars every day. If our economies remain as they are today, we can kiss the World Cup goodbye. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

August 5, 2026

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Students joining universities could self-teach themselves AI to disrupt sectors like agriculture

By Denis Jjuuko The month of August sees public universities open their gates to first year students. Joining university is one of the milestones many young people celebrate, the last step in the journey to the pinnacle of education. In a few years, they would be out of university and joining the workforce. But also, university in Uganda is really the first time somebody enjoys adulthood. The pampering starts to end once you join university. There are no teachers and wardens chasing you out of your room to attend class. Most universities don’t care much how you dress. If you are female, you decide whatever you want to do with your hair. Nobody sends you back home for having a mobile phone. It is in fact a taboo not owning a smartphone. You can return or not even return to your digs. Real freedom is perhaps only enjoyed while at university. When you leave and get married, you start being accountable for every little thing but then I digress. However, it must also be a mixed feeling for many parents, guardians and the students themselves. Have they chosen the right academic course? Will the jobs be available when students finish their academic journeys given the artificial intelligence (AI) disruptions we hear about every day? Many decades ago, a university degree meant a good job. Employers booked future workers before they even graduated. And upon graduation, people found themselves with decent jobs, housing, cars and whatever they needed to succeed. Today, there is no guarantee. The numbers of people joining the labour force are higher than the jobs available. The majority of Ugandan jobs, more than 70%, are in agriculture. Many young graduates aren’t very comfortable working there. In many poor agrarian economies, the pay is usually low and work is in remote areas. The majority of students are from rural communities and they want to try life elsewhere. They have been told for nearly two decades that education is the clearest pathway to a better life, which it is. If they attain education at the highest level only return to the village to work in agriculture, many people would look at them as failures. Yet it shouldn’t be. If you remove gold, coffee is Uganda’s biggest export earner bringing in billions of dollars annually. People have turned their lives around recently because of coffee. The agronomical practices may have changed a bit thanks to campaigns like Mmwanyi Terimba of Buganda Kingdom but there is still a lot that needs to be done. If we are to reach our target of 20 million bags of 60kg annually from about 8.6 million, we need to send some of our educated people to agriculture. The knowledge acquired at university should be used to improve the coffee value chain or any other agricultural product. It could be sales and marketing, post harvest handling, agronomy, logistics, finance, investments, procurement, accounting, value addition etc. Farmers would also have to appreciate the value that graduates bring to the field if they are to see improved yields. Many people employee the least educated and qualified people to look after their investments in agriculture. Pick a boy who can’t even write his name and put him in charge of a poultry farm of 20,000 birds or a 20-acre coffee farm. The results are expected. Frustrations upon frustrations. Africa’s food import bill is nearing US$100 billion a year yet we have a youthful population that is looking for work. How do we put young highly educated people to work in agriculture? If coffee is improving the lives of farmers in Bukomansimbi, it means it can employ young people and give them decent salaries. And the young people will work hard to improve yields on the farms or profitability in the value chain because that is a guaranteed way for them to improve their incomes too. If we reduce how much food we import, that can be money directly put in the pockets of young people. However, the policy makers might be on other perfunctory things. As young people join universities, they need to think of how they can work in sectors like agriculture and turn them around using whatever qualifications they acquire. That is where the jobs are. The universities will likely teach them basics. The majority of university students have a lot of time. Some have classes for a few days a week or just in the evening or a few hours a day. They can use new technologies like AI to teach themselves a few things that may help them disrupt sectors like agriculture. That way they will create value that leads them to securing decent jobs. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com See less

August 5, 2026

#OutToLunch: Xenophobic attacks call for investments in home countries

By Denis Jjuuko In the early 1990s, the world started to witness the dismantling of one of the most antediluvian official racist regimes ever assembled. Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress would be released from prison in 1990 after 27 years of inhumane confinement on Robben Island. A new South Africa was on the horizon. Mandela would win the country’s first multiracial presidential elections in 1994 after his ANC won a large majority of parliamentary seats. Mandela and his ANC’s victory marked the end of official apartheid in South Africa. Mandela mentioned from the beginning that he wasn’t replacing official white racism with official black racism. He called the new South Africa, a rainbow nation. A country that embraced you regardless of the color of your skin. Unlike the majority of the so-called revolutionaries, Mandela ruled for one term. He ended up as one of the world’s most revered statesmen and even became a celebrity! At home, after the euphoria of the 1994 elections, many black South Africans realized that the end of apartheid didn’t mean that they would move from their shebeens in the townships to white homes in leafy suburbs and take over white businesses and send the whites to wherever. South Africa wasn’t Idi Amin’s Uganda. They realized that the rainbow mantra meant co-existence. They rejected it but they were still a bit hopeful. The ANC understood the sentiments of many black people and created policies like black economic empowerment (BEE), which provided opportunities for blacks and other people of color. If a white owned a business, they needed some black people in top management and on the board. Some black people also needed to own shares. Government tenders were reserved for business that embraced BEE. But such opportunities were of course reserved for elite blacks — educated in Europe, America or even in the exclusive South African universities. The majority of the beneficiaries of BEE were ANC stalwarts and that is how they became billionaires and today’s captains of industries. Others became tenderprenuers (influencing government tenders). Apartheid had denied the majority of blacks quality education and other opportunities. They didn’t have skills. The apartheid regime preferred to import professionals from elsewhere to work in black communities or do jobs the whites didn’t want to do. That is how Ugandan teachers and medical doctors ended up in South Africa in the 1980s. They settled there quickly and established themselves as hard working, set up private practices and generally built better lives than many of those they left at home. South Africa had (still does) world class universities and when they opened up the country in 1994, many people started attending school there. I would also end up at an elite South African university 10 years after Mandela had been elected for my graduate education. South Africa was and remains the continent’s most sophisticated and largest economy. As economies of many African nations crumbled, South Africa’s soared. Many Africans unable to be externalized to America or Europe for kyeyo saw it as the next perfect frontier and arrived in droves. Many had seen the doctors and teachers who had migrated earlier living better lives. Those who visited Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban or Pretoria saw a modern country where they wished to work and live. South African TV soap operas Egoli, Generations and Isidingo created a desire that many people wanted to experience themselves. Those who had made it to South Africa arrived back in Kampala every December with fancy cars and threw white-dress themed parties. Another Bantu migration of sorts had to happen but this time to kuyiriba (hustle) including becoming Sangomas (fake traditional healers). In South Africa, ANC riddled with corruption forgot to create jobs for the majority of blacks who were largely uneducated and unskilled. Populist politicians like Julius Malema saw an opportunity and fanned the flames that lead to today’s xenophobic attacks against blacks from outside South Africa. Hundreds have been evacuated back home in Uganda. They are now chilling in Kyankwanzi, ostensibly undergoing orientation. I am not sure what that means. But the xenophobic attacks should be a wake up call for migrants as well as governments of their home countries. People largely migrated to South Africa to find better opportunities for themselves. If we created jobs here, the majority wouldn’t have left. There must be a deliberate way to encourage migrants to invest back home. NSSF should be pushing them for voluntary savings. Capital Markets Authority should be doing drives for collective investments. National Housing should be building houses they can buy. Uganda Investment Authority should be making presentations on where to invest. It used to happen until when politicians hijacked platforms like the Uganda North American Association Convention. Buganda Kingdom is trying with its Buganda Bumu Convention but it is a drop in the ocean. If we refocused, people wouldn’t be evacuated or even deported and returned home with nothing. And lastly an enabling environment that enables businesses to thrive. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

July 22, 2026