What began as a sharp public critique from veteran journalist Andrew Mwenda has now evolved into a much larger national conversation about industrialisation, value addition, and Uganda’s economic future.
In his widely circulated April 2026 commentary titled “When Old Age Strikes a Leader,” Mwenda questioned President Yoweri Museveni’s judgment and accused him of becoming increasingly vulnerable to questionable business proposals and state-backed projects. He specifically criticised government support toward entrepreneurs and industrial ventures he viewed as commercially doubtful, arguing that prolonged time in power had weakened the President’s ability to rigorously assess business viability.
Mwenda’s article did not only target individuals. It also indirectly challenged Uganda’s broader state-led industrialisation model, including government-backed manufacturing and value-addition projects that Museveni has aggressively championed for years.
Now, the President has responded forcefully and publicly, using Uganda’s growing gold refining industry as his strongest economic defence.
At the centre of Museveni’s rebuttal is a simple but powerful argument: Africa has remained poor not because it lacks resources, but because it continues exporting raw materials while other economies capture the real value through processing and manufacturing.
Using gold as his headline example, Museveni argued that exporting unprocessed minerals amounts to surrendering wealth.
“Parasites export gold at 84% purity at USD 60,000 per kilogram while refined gold at 99.9% purity earns USD 168,000 per kilogram,” Museveni wrote.
For the President, the numbers validate Uganda’s controversial decision to ban the export of unprocessed minerals, a policy that initially faced resistance from sections of the business community and free-market critics.
According to Museveni, the intervention has already transformed Uganda into a major refining hub, with the country now hosting 10 gold refineries and generating approximately USD 7.48 billion in gold exports.
That figure has now become one of the administration’s strongest talking points in defending its industrialisation agenda.
Museveni framed the gold sector as proof that deliberate state intervention can force structural economic change, attract investment into local processing, and help Uganda retain more value from its natural resources instead of exporting wealth abroad.
The President also widened the argument beyond mining.
He pointed to Uganda’s coffee industry, where raw coffee exports generate only about USD 2.5 per kilogram while processed and branded coffee products fetch between USD 25 and USD 40 internationally.
The same logic, he argued, applies across dairy, fruit processing, palm oil, steel, and manufacturing.
Uganda’s coffee production, Museveni noted, has expanded from 3 million bags to 8.8 million bags, generating approximately USD 2.4 billion in export earnings, while dairy output has surged from 200 million litres to 5.3 billion litres.
For Museveni, these are not isolated statistics. They are evidence that Uganda’s industrialisation strategy is beginning to reshape the structure of the economy.
“Failure from which we learn lessons is success,” Museveni stated, defending experimentation and long-term investment in industrial growth despite criticism and implementation challenges.
From a Business Times perspective, the deeper significance of this exchange lies not in the political clash itself, but in the economic debate underneath it.
At stake is a critical policy question confronting many African economies: should governments actively force value addition and industrialisation through interventionist policies, or should markets alone determine economic direction?
Museveni clearly belongs to the first school of thought.
His response signals a government increasingly willing to use export controls, strategic incentives, and state-backed industrial policy to build domestic manufacturing and processing capacity.
For businesses and investors, the implications are substantial.
Value-addition industries create downstream opportunities in logistics, packaging, refining technology, transport, financing, exports, and skilled labour. Gold refining alone supports an expanding ecosystem of processors, exporters, compliance specialists, and regional trade networks.
At the same time, Mwenda’s criticism raises concerns that many private sector observers quietly share: whether government enthusiasm for industrialisation is always matched with rigorous project evaluation, transparency, and accountability.
That tension between ambition and execution now sits at the centre of Uganda’s economic transformation story.
Still, Uganda’s gold numbers are difficult to ignore.
The shift from exporting raw minerals to refined products represents more than a commodity story. It reflects an attempt to reposition Uganda from a supplier of raw materials into a participant higher up the global value chain.
For an economy seeking long-term resilience, stronger exports, industrial jobs, and reduced dependence on imports, that transition could prove transformative if successfully sustained.
The argument between Museveni and Mwenda may have started as a political exchange, but it has evolved into something far larger; a national debate about how Uganda creates wealth, who captures value, and whether industrialisation can finally move from political rhetoric to measurable economic reality
