By Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) President Jimmy Akena has dismissed key economic claims made by President Yoweri Museveni during his recent budget speech, accusing the National Resistance Movement (NRM) of manipulating statistics and taking undue credit for Uganda’s economic trajectory.
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Speaking at a press conference held at Uganda House, Akena took aim at the President’s assertion that Uganda’s economy had grown 15 times since 1986, and that tax rates had dropped significantly. “Those statistics are not true,” he said bluntly. “You cannot claim massive economic growth while ignoring the collapse in the value of the shilling.”
Akena cited the depreciation of the Uganda shilling as a major concern, pointing out that the exchange rate has shifted from UGX 14 to the dollar in the late 1980s to over UGX 3,600 today. “That’s a depreciation of over 25,000%. If the currency has lost that much value, how can we claim the economy has grown 55 times?”
He accused President Museveni of revising history to portray himself as the architect of Uganda’s liberalized economy, noting that the NRM initially embraced a fixed exchange rate system. “The first NRM budget fixed the exchange rate at UGX 1,400 to the dollar. The liberalization narrative came later, and even then, they inherited groundwork laid by UPC.”
According to Akena, much of Uganda’s economic foundation was established by the UPC government prior to 1986. “Programs like the Revised Recovery Programme, which the NRM later repackaged as the Rehabilitation and Development Plan, were created by UPC. Without them, Uganda would have been in a total mess,” he said.
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He also hinted at broader political implications, declaring that economic truth-telling would form a central pillar of UPC’s 2026 campaign. “We are going to dismantle NRM’s quasi-economic theories and expose them for what they are,” Akena stated.
In a strong rebuke, he labeled the NRM leadership “fraudsters” who had “fluked their way through 38 years” of governance. “Now is the time for truth,” he declared, vowing to challenge the dominant political and economic narrative that he says has painted UPC unfairly for decades.
