Overview:
Uganda's NIC Holdings plans a 50 billion shilling asset redevelopment and balance sheet overhaul after Cornerstone Asset Managers buys a 73 percent stake.
Kampala — Uganda’s oldest insurer is to return to majority local ownership after a Ugandan investment firm agreed to buy the controlling stake held by its Nigerian shareholder.
Cornerstone Asset Managers is acquiring the 64.95 percent stake in NIC Holdings owned by Nigeria’s Industrial and General Insurance. The deal was put to shareholders at NIC’s 25th annual general meeting in Kampala on Friday. It still needs approval from regulators.
Once it closes, the stake will be held through a special purpose vehicle, Twenty One Ventures Limited. Cornerstone’s total holding will rise to about 73 percent, a controlling position. The remaining shares will keep trading on the Uganda Securities Exchange.
Professor Samuel Sejjaaka, who has joined the NIC board and spoke for the new owner, said the takeover returned a national institution to local hands. Cornerstone is wholly Ugandan-owned and just two years old.
“From being partly Nigerian-owned, it is now fully Ugandan-owned,” Sejjaaka said. He said the firm wanted to raise insurance uptake in a country where fewer than five people in 100 hold cover, and to sell products suited to ordinary Ugandans.
NIC is not the company it once was. Privatised in 2005, when the government sold a majority stake to the Nigerian insurer, and listed in Kampala in 2010, it was once the market leader. It now ranks 17th. Its general insurance business grew about five percent last year, against 15 percent for the industry, and the group made a net loss of 1.52 billion shillings in 2025.
That loss means no dividend, again. Dan Musime, the chief executive designate of NIC Holdings and NIC General Insurance, said the board was holding on to cash to fund a recovery rather than pay out.
“We are trying to re-establish a strong balance sheet, take out all toxic assets,” Musime said. The immediate task, he said, was to keep the capital the insurer needs to hold its licence. Dividends would return once reforms began to show results.
Sejjaaka set out how the new owners plan to turn the business around. They will streamline operations, move underwriting and customer service onto new digital systems, and redevelop a property portfolio he said was being wasted. Cornerstone expects to spend up to 50 billion shillings on NIC’s buildings, including a site on Jinja Road and the corporation’s head office. Within two years, he told shareholders, the company would be paying dividends again.
“Please keep your shares, and we will make you smile all the way to the bank,” he said.
Much of his pitch rested on the record of the incoming managers. Sejjaaka said he and Simon Mwebaze, Cornerstone’s managing director and a former head of Old Mutual’s Uganda investment arm, had built an Old Mutual fund from 80 billion to more than four trillion shillings, and had grown Cornerstone from nothing to one trillion shillings in two years. Mwebaze also joins the NIC board.
The deal awaits clearance from the Insurance Regulatory Authority and the Capital Markets Authority. They are expected to test whether Cornerstone is fit to run a licensed insurer and whether placing the assets under one manager could put policyholders at risk.
Sejjaaka said the change would be orderly. The board, chaired by Dr Shem Bageine, stays in place apart from directors who have retired, and the sale was an agreed exit rather than a hostile one. He thanked Kabir Tuggar, who flew in from Nigeria to support the handover.
Asked about sport, Sejjaaka said Cornerstone would keep backing NIC’s netball team, which is bound for the Commonwealth Games, and was in advanced talks to sponsor Express, Uganda’s oldest football club.