UGX 34bn and rising: the supervision bill weighing on Uganda’s Namanve Industrial Park

KAMPALA — The bill for supervising Uganda’s flagship industrial park has swelled to UGX 34.2bn and is still climbing — more than double, per month, what the job cost under the international consortium that held it first. Now a court case and a running state investigation are forcing the question the figure begs: how a contract handed to a lesser-known firm by direct award came to cost the public so much more than the market it replaced.

The supervision in question is of the Kampala Industrial and Business Park (KIBP) at Namanve, the centrepiece of Uganda’s industrialisation drive, financed by a €219.5m (about UGX 1 trillion) UK Export Finance loan signed in December 2019. The Owner’s Engineer overseeing the works is a joint venture of PM Excellence (UK) Limited and MBW Consulting Limited — and it is that joint venture whose pricing, procurement and paperwork are now under scrutiny from the Commercial Court and the Inspectorate of Government alike.

Reduce the deal to a single figure — cost per month — and the problem announces itself. The predecessor consortium’s entire six-year, €8.8m (about UGX 38bn) engagement worked out to roughly UGX 510m a month before tax. The replacement’s cumulative UGX 34.2bn runs at about UGX 1.07bn a month, tax included — more than twice the rate, for a mainly local firm that carries none of an international consultancy’s costs: no expatriate salaries, no airfares, no work permits, no overseas mobilisation. Stripped of every expense that might justify a premium, it should have come in cheaper. It came in dearer.

Closer up, the numbers look worse. The first ten-month engagement, at UGX 17.1bn, ran above UGX 1.7bn for each active month — more than three times the old rate. A lump-sum contract signed in February 2026 releases about a fifth of its value, some UGX 2.56bn, on the submission of a single inception report. And the headline UGX 34.2bn is not one price but four contracts stacked into one number — an initial deal, two addenda and the 2026 lump sum — the scope re-priced at every turn even as, UIA insiders have told local media, the park’s actual scope was being cut. It is less a fixed price than a tab that has grown each time the door swung open.

How the job came to this firm is the second half of the story. When construction began, the park’s Owner’s Engineer was a consortium of two international firms, Roughton International and Turner & Townsend, working with the Ugandan firms Joadah Consult and Basic Group — a team chosen through open, competitive tender. The Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) terminated that contract in August 2022. Publicly, the authority blamed the consortium, citing weak supervision and delays in clearing designs. The records reviewed for this article tell it differently: the termination, they show, was effected under the contract’s no-fault clause — a provision that lets a client simply elect to have the work done by others, with no finding of failure attached. On that reading, the “additional cost” UIA has since sought to recover is not a loss inflicted by the sacked consortium but the price of the authority’s own decision to replace it.

And the replacement was never competitively tendered. With roughly eleven months in hand to run an open procurement, UIA used a direct award — the very method the competitive rules exist to keep at bay, because with no rival bid to hold it down, the price is free to drift upward. PM Excellence entered not through the open process then running but through an unsolicited proposal championed within UIA’s top management, while established UK firms shortlisted by the British High Commission in 2019 — among them AECOM, Arup, Atkins and Mott MacDonald — were never even approached. The conditions the procurement regulator, the PPDA, attaches to any direct award — due diligence and a value-for-money assessment — appear not to have been satisfied before it went ahead. Within weeks of winning, PM Excellence formed its joint venture with MBW Consulting and handed operational control to MBW, hollowing out the very “British expertise” used to justify the award.

The firm at the centre of it is slighter than the contract it holds. Corporate records show PM Excellence (UK) Limited was registered in 2017 with £100 in nominal share capital, two employees and a portfolio of jobs worth between $15,000 and $30,000 (roughly UGX 56m to 113m) — against a contract whose own terms demanded annual turnover of around €50m (about UGX 216bn). The distance between the firm and the job is not a step but a chasm.

What has now dragged the arrangement into open court is not the pricing but a fee a middleman refused to write off. The High Court’s Commercial Division has summoned PM Excellence and MBW to file a defence to a claim brought by a firm called AD Concepts Limited, under Civil Suit No. HCT-00-CC-CS-0605-2026. AD Concepts says the joint venture engaged it in April 2023 to prepare bid documents, do the legal work and “facilitate the securing” of the supervision contract — for a fee of €800,000 (about UGX 3.5bn). The work was delivered, it says, the contract won, and payment then fell due.

Instead of paying, the joint venture negotiated a settlement, signed on 13 October 2025, that cut the fee to €600,000 (about UGX 2.6bn), made €320,000 (about UGX 1.4bn) payable up front, and tied the remaining €280,000 (about UGX 1.2bn) to a single, improbable event: the joint venture clawing back UGX 3.4bn that UIA had withheld as value added tax — money owed to the revenue authority, not to anyone on the contract. If the VAT was never released, the contract said, the UGX 1.4bn already paid would count as the last, and the balance would disappear. A fee for work already done had been pinned to a wager over money that was never the joint venture’s to collect.

And AD Concepts’ lawyers say the joint venture already knew the wager was lost. In correspondence, its counsel, GEM Advocates, contend that fifty-five days before the settlement was signed, the Solicitor General had written to UIA’s Executive Director raising substantive doubts about whether that VAT could ever be recovered — and that the joint venture, holding that letter, said nothing. Counsel calls it a condition impossible from inception, a concealment of a material fact, and a fee structure built on “artificially created uncertainty.” These are contentions in a civil suit yet to be tested, and the joint venture has not filed its defence.

It is the founding fee, though, that most unsettles procurement specialists. Money paid to help win a public contract — a commission, a success fee, a finder’s fee — is treated with deep suspicion under procurement and anti-corruption rules everywhere, because it is among the oldest ways known to inflate a public price, and where such payments exist they are meant to be declared openly. Part of the AD Concepts fee was, on the documents’ own wording, for “facilitating the securing of the contract” — the exact shape of a success fee, yet billed as consultancy for bid preparation and legal support. None of this is proof of wrongdoing; a large consultancy fee can be exactly what it says. But the gap between the label and the work described is wide, and it points back to the pricing. If winning the contract required a substantial success fee dressed as consultancy, the money had to come from somewhere — and a lean consortium priced to win an open tender offers no room to bury such a cost, while a directly awarded replacement, priced behind a closed door at double the going rate, has room to spare.

The billing invites its own questions. Records reviewed for this article indicate that invoices submitted under the joint venture included staff who never worked on the project — names absent from attendance registers, meeting minutes and project files. A former project manager is said to have rejected those invoices; a successor is recorded as approving them after the first manager was removed. Monthly billing has been put at between $300,000 and $500,000 (about UGX 1.1bn to 1.9bn) for a locally-based firm. Each of those claims is checkable against attendance records, payroll and tax remittances and the payment file — which is why they demand an answer rather than a shrug.

None of this sits in isolation. The Namanve project is already years late and, at the last public count, around 60 percent built against a 2024 deadline. It has drawn the Inspectorate of Government, whose probe has ranged across UIA land deals, payroll and the very termination of the original Owner’s Engineer, and it has already produced one scandal over “honoraria” paid to UIA staff after that termination — payments that drew a refund directive from the investment minister, Evelyn Anite, and a summons from the President.

For a project built to advertise Uganda’s industrial ambition, the question the numbers leave on the page is the simplest one: how a supervisor with no international cost base, measured against international rates, came to cost the public more than double — chosen by direct award rather than open tender, on a shrinking scope of work. No ordinary procurement rationale on the record so far explains it. The extraordinary ones are now for the High Court, and the investigators, to weigh. PM Excellence, MBW Consulting and UIA are each entitled to respond; the joint venture’s defence to the AD Concepts claim has yet to be filed.