There is a particular kind of confidence that settles on a man who has already won the arguments that matter. Mr Francis Kamulegeya carries it well. At the Fairway Hotel in Kampala on a recent evening, he sits before a room of young tax professionals, comprising of lawyers, accountants, people with MBAs and fresh ambitions, and tells them, without any drama, that credentials will open a door, competence will earn you a seat, but it is character that makes you stay in the room.
To understand where Mr Kamulegeya ended up, you have to start where he began: Masaka, 1967, in a home where his mother Josephine ran a licensed Enguli gin distillery. He grew up in the shadow of Idi Amin, with the military barracks so close they complicated his childhood. He left at eleven, just after the war that ended that particular chapter of Uganda’s misery. He went to Namasagali College, then Makerere University, to study agriculture from 1987 to 1990. Botany. Crop science. Entomology. He can still walk into a room, spot a plant, and tell you it’s Lantana camara. These are not skills that appear on any tax advisory brief.
They are, however, the skills of someone trained to read a system, to understand what something actually is, not just what it’s called. That habit of mind would travel everywhere with him. After graduating, he became a maize trader in Mbiriizi, a town in the southern part of the Central Region of Uganda (Lwengo District). His edge was that he could bite through a grain with his front teeth and tell you the moisture content. He did this for six months. Then he left for England. Between 1991 and 1992, Mr Kamulegeya did a tour of what he calls ‘every job that exists in this hotel’. He cooked potatoes. He cleaned toilets.
He drove a minibus. He worked as a lifeguard. One afternoon when a colleague didn’t show, he put on a white apron and white hat and served lunch to schoolchildren as the dinner lady and got paid double for the double shift. He was raising £5,400 (currently about Shs26.37 million) to enrol in college. Within 18 months, he had more than he needed. ‘For young professionals, it’s very, very important that you get into the habit of distinguishing who you are from what you do, so that when what you do changes, you do not lose your identity,’ he says.
He enrolled in college, qualified as an accountant in 1994, joined PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) London in 1996, and encountered a reform to the UK tax system called self-assessment. Something in his brain lit up and never quite went off again. He sat the exams of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, passed them, and became the first Ugandan ever to qualify as a UK Chartered Tax Advisor.
The poor cousin of audits
In 2000, PwC sent him to Uganda. The Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) had only been created in 1991. Value Added Tax (VAT) had been introduced as recently as 1996, replacing a patchwork of sales taxes, and was barely four years old. Many staff had simply been transferred from customs when the institution was set up. The big accounting firms in Kampala called themselves auditing firms. Tax, as Mr Kamulegeya puts it, was ‘a poor cousin of audits.’ He had seen something different. He had lived in a system where tax consulting was its own serious profession and the relationship between advisor and revenue authority was one of adversarial respect.
He walked into Uganda and saw, simultaneously, a problem and an enormous opportunity. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s late partner and one of the more formidable minds in American finance, spent decades warning against what he called ‘man with a hammer syndrome’, who is the specialist who interprets every problem through a single lens. His antidote was a ‘latticework of mental models,’ drawing from biology, physics, psychology, and law simultaneously. Munger built a multi-billion-dollar fortune on cross-disciplinary thinking. Mr Kamulegeya built Uganda’s modern tax profession on something very similar, and arrived at it via botany, maize trading, and dinner lady shifts in Croydon.
‘Tax sits at the interface of almost everything,’ he says. ‘If you look at it just from a technical perspective and you stay in that very narrow lane, you are going to miss out.’ He built the PwC Uganda tax practice from seven people into a dominant market force, sending specialists abroad for years before the market knew it needed them: Crystal Kabajwara to the UK for transfer pricing, Pamela Natamba for oil and gas, and Trevor Bwanika to South Africa for international tax and mergers. Then he turned his attention to the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) itself. In 2004, a new Financial Institutions Act required banks to raise their minimum capital.
Mr Kamulegeya saw a solution URA had never encountered: issue bonus shares, using retained reserves to capitalise the banks. Legal under company law, standard in the UK, completely new in Uganda. The Revenue Authority said: bonus shares are dividends, and dividends are taxable. Mr Kamulegeya said: No; retained reserves already belong to the shareholders. Reissuing them as shares changes the form, not the substance. He won. URA promptly amended the Income Tax Act to define dividends to include bonus shares. Look at Section 2 today; it is there because of this fight. When the other side changes the law in response to your argument, it means your argument worked.
In 2010, Zain International BV, a Netherlands company, sold its pan-African mobile operations to Bharti Airtel in a deal worth $10.7 billion (Shs39.04 trillion). URA raised an $85 million (Shs310.16 billion) capital gains tax assessment on Zain’s Ugandan interests. Mr Kamulegeya took the other side. His instrument was surgical: the Uganda-Netherlands double taxation treaty, he told them, means no capital gain arises here.
You do not have the right to tax this. ‘A few of them,’ he says, with characteristic restraint, ‘that was the first time they knew about the treaty’. The case became one of the most-watched tax disputes in East African history, permanently changing how Uganda thinks about double taxation agreements and how multinationals structure investment through offshore holding companies.
Inclusion
In 2003, Mr Kamulegeya was a senior manager appearing on television to analyse the national budget. Then he ran into Moses Kirangwa (now deceased). Mr Kirangwa was a childhood friend from Masaka. They had grown up in the same village, played Gogolo (also known as the Rainbow Slide) as barefoot boys. Then Mr Kamulegeya left for Kampala, for England, and for PwC. Mr Kirangwa stayed. He was had an hearing impairment. He had never gone to school, not because he couldn’t learn, but because the system had decided there was no place for him. He was a cobbler, working from a bench on a street in Masaka.
When they reconnected after 25 years, communicating through an interpreter, Mr Kirangwa told Mr Kamulegeya something he has been acting on ever since: the difference between us is education. ‘Here I was, senior manager on the TV analysing the budget and people thinking I’m important, and this guy who I grew up with in the village told me that basically, if I didn’t go to school, I could be like him. He told me that because he had never seen me for the last 23 years, he had also assumed that I’d died.’
In 2005, Mr Kamulegeya co-founded the Masaka School for the Deaf with his late sister, Sophia Kafeero, with teachers, classrooms, a curriculum, and a plan. More than 1,200 deaf learners have since passed through it. Seventeen have graduated from university, according to his narration. There is now a vocational training institute alongside it, and a coffee farm where students are taught agriculture.
The man who once bit through maize grains to read their moisture content is now teaching deaf children to grow coffee. He also runs Time to Play, a children’s centre he opened in 2009 after his daughters visiting from England asked their house help, Annette, to take them to ‘the park’, and Annette, interpreting this sensibly for Kampala, offered them a tour of taxi parks. The misunderstanding, Mr Kamulegeya felt, was actionable. For years on Sundays, he would slip into the SpongeBob costume and work the floor. Nobody knew it was the Country Senior Partner of PwC Uganda inside the foam suit.
Retirement
In 2022, after 27 years at PwC, 12 as Country Senior Partner, eight on the PwC Africa Governance Board, the first Ugandan to serve on that body, Mr Kamulegeya left. He refuses to call it retirement. ‘I never ever wanted to be pushed out by a system simply because of a number. At 60 years of age, that’s the retirement age at PwC. But what happens to me at 60? I’ve been doing very, very well. So, I’m not going to just sit there waiting for the clock to tick.’
He left at the height of it. This is, among people who build careers, almost impossibly rare. He went to Thailand, came back looking 10 years younger, and built what he calls his second half; five board roles, including Chairman of IandM Bank Uganda, and a memoir, ‘And Then What? Reflections on Life, Leadership, and Meaning Beyond Success’, launched in April 2026. The question in the title is the most demanding one you can ask yourself. It prevents you from mistaking a milestone for a destination. You get the degree, and then what? You get the promotion, and then what?
More importantly, it is the question you ask once you have, by any reasonable measure, already succeeded. You’ve changed the law multiple times, built a school, mentored a generation. And then what? ‘If everything you’re doing is for yourself, it’s likely to end with you. And that would be very unfortunate. But if you do things that are going to endure, because your time is finite, it’s going to be long, but it’s very finite; you’ll continue.’ Back at the Fairway Hotel, the young professionals are still in the room.
This is one of ‘The Tax Nights’ organised by Edwin Echiba, a tax lawyer, on the first Thursday of the month. All of them have been in the presence of something increasingly rare: a man who built something significant, knows what he built, and is not confused about why. He wants to be remembered, he says, as the person who made a positive difference in whoever he met. ‘There’s no point holding knowledge without sharing it,’ he says. ‘Nobody knows what you know until you share it. And whenever you play it forward, it keeps going.’