Overview:
The NUP leader targets Uganda's transport failures, promising to build regional airports and revive railways to support new cocoa processing factories and enhance national economic competitiveness.
Ugandan opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu is campaigning on an ambitious economic platform that links agricultural industrialisation to a radical overhaul of the nation’s crumbling transport networks, specifically targeting inefficiencies in the cocoa supply chain.
The National Unity Platform (NUP) presidential candidate vowed to tackle the high cost of doing business in the Rwenzori region by prioritising infrastructure that supports value addition, arguing that poor logistics are suppressing farmer incomes.
Kyagulanyi’s core pledge is to build chocolate processing factories in the cocoa-rich districts of Ntoroko and Bundibugyo. He framed this factory investment as impossible without simultaneous improvements in infrastructure to ensure raw cocoa can be moved efficiently and finished chocolate products can reach markets swiftly.
“Trucks that come to this area shall not take your raw cocoa but chocolate,” Kyagulanyi told supporters, directly addressing the decades-long issue of Uganda remaining a raw materials exporter, even as its cocoa industry generates nearly $150m annually.
The Logistics Bottleneck
The NUP leader focused heavily on systemic bottlenecks that plague the supply chain for Uganda’s fourth-largest agricultural export. He promised to restore the country’s dilapidated railway network, a major commercial artery that currently operates at low efficiency and high cost.
Furthermore, Kyagulanyi criticised the lack of multiple regional air transport hubs. He pointed out the irony that despite the short geographical distance, the lack of direct air connections means goods and people from Bundibugyo face unnecessarily long, circuitous, and costly journeys to reach regional markets.
“Why have we had only one airport in 40 years?” he asked, pledging to decentralise air travel by building at least one airport in every region. For the business sector, this promise is aimed at reducing logistical lead times, a key determinant of competitiveness in global commodity trading.
Competing Industrial Visions
Kyagulanyi’s policy is a direct challenge to the incumbent government’s economic model, which has consistently failed to deliver on its own similar promises. Farmers in Bundibugyo have, for instance, been waiting seven years for the promised construction of a government cocoa processing factory.
The opposition’s platform underscores the widespread belief that Uganda’s economic stagnation stems from a failure to connect productive rural areas with affordable, reliable transport and processing facilities.
The candidate concluded by linking economic prosperity to governance, arguing that his plan for job creation and industrialisation—including his pledge to boost the underfunded health sector—depends on redirecting resources currently wasted on what he termed “misplaced priorities.”