By Mulengera Reporters
In his 12th October 2023 letter, President Museveni introduced Intracom company owned by a Burundian billionaire and directed the Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja to help get the Gender Ministry surrender 130 acres out of the 377 acres which they own at Kampiringisa in Mpigi district, where the Kampiringisa Juvenile Rehabilitation Centre is located.
However, the Gender Ministry bosses, through the Juvenile Centre’s Principal, defied the big man from Rwakitura and gave only 100 acres of land to the investor. No reason was given for this distortion of the President’s directive. Available information now indicates that a group of top officials are busy strategizing on how the other 30 acres can quietly be shared among themselves.
This failure to give 130 acres, as was directed by the President, has constrained the investor to the extent that the land can’t be used as staging ground as would have been desirable.
The investor desires to have that 30 acres and use it for purposes of situating his generators there plus things like heavy trucks and as well as storage facilities. Reports reaching the President indicate that the investor’s operations are being constrained as a result of this hostile act by the Gender Ministry officials.
There are concerns that even the 100 acres wasn’t promptly availed to the investor as the officials at the Lands Ministry kept dragging their feet on the processing of the leasehold titles. The process, which the President believed would take just weeks, ended up taking almost two years. The President had directed URA to process tax incentives for 20 years for the investor and gratefully, that was promptly complied with.
The relevant Ministries like MAAIF were tasked with facilitating the investor to have access to raw materials such as cow dung from livestock farmers in the cattle corridor, phosphates and potassium from the Eastern Ugandan district of Tororo.
The Ministries of Energy, Water and Works were also tasked to provide all the required amenities on the ground to enable the investor establish his fertilizers manufacturing plant and other relevant facilities within 18 months.
Whereas Gen Katumba Wamala’s Works Ministry tried their best and promptly responded, there was no government money with which fuel and graders to be used to do the work would be promptly purchased. The investor ended up paying for the fuel used and also parting with money to hire the graders.
This ended up costing the investor more than Shs3bn for the required road opening infrastructure to be put in place. Time too was lost as the investor mobilized the money (those billions) that was never part of initial his plans.
In the typical Ugandan way of doing things, the Ministries of Energy and Water took forever to provide the necessary power and the water supply infrastructure which the President had directed be put in place to enable the investor carry out his project. In fact, the two Ministries only delivered a few weeks ago and regrettably, the water part hasn’t yet been completed even up to this day.
Generally, there has been government-wide hostility to this investor because many public officials have for years been involved in the importation, trading and resale of low quality fertilizers which have contributed to low agricultural yields in the country, which is why the President was enchanted to have Intracom offer to come and invest in Uganda.
Theirs are organic fertilizers, not chemical like shrewd government officials have been importing into the country and thereby condemn the country’s farmers to poor and low-yielding farming practices. The investor (Intracom) is already into this organic fertilizers manufacturing business in Tanzania/Dodoma and in Burundi too. In the two countries, the investor churns out millions of tons of fertilizers annually.
The President believes that farming will become more productive once farmers have effective and more affordable fertilizers and that his key government programs and wealth creation interventions such as PDM will deliver the intended transformation more easily once fertilizers-related constraints are mitigated.
In the same written directive, the President had directed Nabbanja to work with the Ministries of Finance and Agriculture to ensure that Shs80bn is quickly mobilized and passed on to Intracom to enable the investor to import fertilizers from Tanzania to support farming activities in the country in the interim period as the Kampiringisa plant gets established. These are to be distributed to farmers free of charge in every corner of the country.
However, government officials have since distorted this to by splitting the Shs80bn 50-50 in favor of Prof Mathias Magoola whose struggling fertilizers manufacturing business has controversially been allocated Shs40bn to enable him participate too.
Magoola is understood to be intending to use chicken droppings (in Luganda called kalimbwe) to make fertilizers worth Shs40bn which will be distributed to farmers across the country besides the Shs40bn worth of organic fertilizers, which Intracom will be bringing in and distributing to farmers across the country effective next month (May 2026). (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
