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State Minister for Economic Monitoring Sandra Santa Alum has ordered security agencies to arrest an Otuke District councillor accused of taking Shs5 million meant for his 112-year-old grandmother under the government cattle restocking programme.

Alum issued the directive after Lamex Okello, a relative of the elderly beneficiary, reported during her oversight visit to Otuke on Thursday that Christopher Atiko, a councillor for Alangor, used his position as the woman’s next of kin to access the money before disappearing to Kampala.

Okello said his aunt, Joyce Awenyi, was selected as a beneficiary but, because of her advanced age, relied on relatives to handle her documents and programme-related transactions.

He said he was keeping her national identity card and other documents when Atiko, accompanied by the Agweng parish chief, asked him to surrender the documents to register as her next of kin.

“He came with the parish chief of Agweng and he asked that I give him the old woman’s documents claiming he was going to the district to be a next of kin,” Okello said.

He said the councillor was subsequently registered as the next of kin and collected the Shs5 million when it was released.

“After this man picked this Shs5 million, he escaped,” Okello said.

Okello said he reported the matter to the Resident District Commissioner, who directed him to open a case at Otuke Central Police Station.

He said the Agweng LC1 and LC2 chairpersons and parish chief had recorded statements after being summoned by police.

Alum described the case as particularly disturbing because the beneficiary is over 100 years old and the accused is a local leader.

“A grandmother of over 100 years was deceived by a grandson and this grandson is even a leader, the LC councillor for this sub-county, coming and deceiving the grandmother and running away with all the money for the cattle compensation!” she said.

The minister directed security agencies including the RDC and police to pursue and arrest the councillor and ensure the money is recovered.

“What we have decided to do is to look for this councilor and bring him before the law. He has to pay for this money and the law should take its course up to its logical conclusion,” she said.

“This coming from a leader is very unfortunate,” Alum added, saying the case should serve as a warning against political interference in government programmes.

The minister was also told that Atiko allegedly took another Shs30 million previously received by Awenyi under an earlier cattle compensation programme. The Shs30 million allegation was raised during the visit but was not independently established.

Alum also raised concern over an alleged practice where people rent out their national identity cards to access Parish Development Model funds.

“Another strange finding that we have got here is that people are now renting their IDs whereby the owner of the ID is given Shs200,000. Then the other person takes Shs800,000,” she said.

She directed security agencies to apprehend those involved, recover the funds and ensure they are returned to the intended beneficiaries.

National Social Security Fund (NSSF) is confronting a demographic swing familiar to pension funds worldwide.

As managing director, Patrick Ayota runs a Fund where every member has their own savings account, where contributions get invested in bonds, property and other assets, and that pool generates its own ongoing income in the form of bond interest, rental yields, and dividends.

That income, along with new contributions coming in, gives the Fund the cash it needs on hand to pay retiring members.

The pressure NSSF is watching sits on the contributions side of that equation. In 2015, just 27 percent of contributions collected went straight back out as benefits.

By 2026, that share has risen to 70 percent, according to official data.

As that ratio rises, less fresh cash from contributions is left over to reinvest and grow the Fund’s asset base, even as investment income continues covering part of the payouts.

On current trends, contributions and payouts converge around 2031, and by 2032 the Fund may be paying out more in benefits than it collects.

At this point, it would need to draw more heavily on investment income, and potentially the assets themselves, to keep meeting its obligations.

That is a trend worth planning around well ahead of time for an institution managing $9.3b in assets, by NSSF’s own account, one it has been tracking closely.

Ayota’s answer, unveiled at the NSSF Outreach Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday, held with the Uganda High Commission there, is to look beyond Uganda’s borders.

Kenya alone hosts an estimated 300,000 Ugandan nationals, most sending money home monthly through informal channels that touch no Ugandan financial institution.

Multiply that across a diaspora working in Bangkok, Hanoi and the Gulf, and the sums grow substantial.

‘If we can get one million people who save with us from the diaspora, that would be a job well done,’ Ayota says, an ambitious target for a product that has, in 22 months, attracted 150,000 accounts and over Shs14b in savings as of mid-2026.

Voluntary, and deliberately so

The first thing to understand about NSSF’s diaspora pitch is that it is not a claim on anyone’s mandatory pension contributions.

A Ugandan working formally in Nairobi pays into Kenya’s own NSSF, as Kenyan law requires.

Uganda has no jurisdiction over that money, and no mechanism existed for decades to let Ugandans without a local employer save into their home country’s scheme at all.

That changed only after a 2022 legal amendment, with the voluntary product launching in November 2024.

What exists now, then, is an account funded from a saver’s income after statutory deductions, as any other income a saver may have from other sources. It is, in essence, a supplement, not a substitute.

A separate, reciprocal arrangement runs between NSSF Uganda and NSSF Kenya where a member who has saved with NSSF Uganda and relocates to Kenya can transfer that balance to NSSF Kenya, and a returnee can do the reverse.

But it activates only upon permanent relocation. NSSF wants half of Uganda’s working population saving for retirement by 2035, up from roughly 13 percent today.

More than 10.5 million Ugandans are currently employed across various sectors in the country, according to official data from National Statistics Bureau.

Getting there means reaching well past salaried employment, since replacing one retiring member requires roughly 13 new lower-paid entrants, a slow way to grow.

That reasoning has already pushed NSSF into Uganda’s informal economy, testing an inverted approach.

Rather than pressing cash-strapped farmers to save money they do not have, it first raises their income, linking them to guaranteed markets through its Hi-Innovator programme so they can invest in things like fertiliser and irrigation.

Ayota and his team believe this can roughly quadruple farmer earnings at the same market price, after which a 10 percent savings rate becomes far less painful.

The diaspora is the same reasoning in reverse. Ugandans earning in Kenyan shillings, Thai baht, or Vietnamese dong are often already earning more, in sturdier currencies, than they would at home.

The income problem NSSF is solving domestically does not apply to them. The trust problem does.

The currency questions

A Ugandan in Nairobi earns, budgets, and dreams in Kenyan shillings. NSSF’s core account is priced in Ugandan shillings.

Money converts twice, on deposit and on withdrawal, often decades later, and if the shilling weakens against the Kenyan currency or the dollar in the interim, part of the saver’s real return slowly evaporates, even as the balance keeps rising on paper.

NSSF says it is building a fix which is a dollar-denominated product, tentatively called ‘SmartLife Dollar,’ designed to hold contributions in dollar-based assets rather than converting them into shillings at all.

Ayota says the rollout was delayed so the Fund could line up dollar-denominated assets first, avoiding local-currency exposure altogether.

Bank of Uganda financial data shows that the shilling has broadly held its value against the dollar over five- and 10-year stretches except for a recent sharp slide past 3,900 in the middle of rising oil prices.

A long-term savings product shields a saver from this volatility.

A crowded field

Whatever NSSF offers, it does not arrive in a vacuum. Kenya has built one of East Africa’s more developed savings ecosystems comprised of Saccos paying competitive dividends, a functioning stock exchange, mobile-money unit trusts, a retail government bond called M-Akiba, and Kenya’s own NSSF running a comparable diaspora scheme, Haba Haba.

A Ugandan in Nairobi weighing an account back home is comparing it against familiar, shilling-denominated options that require no currency conversion and no leap of faith in an unfamiliar institution.

NSSF’s counter-argument rests on safety and a genuinely distinctive perk of housing.

On safety, Ayota points to government bonds as the anchor of the Fund’s portfolio across Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania alike, calling NSSF one of the largest buyers at Uganda’s monthly bond auctions.

The genuine differentiator from other pension funds is land and housing. Through its own developments and a partnership with Housing Finance Bank, NSSF members can borrow against their savings to buy property in Uganda, with the loan backed by life cover of up to 100 percent.

Jane Mutesi, who manages high-net-worth clients at the bank, frames this as protection against the worst case.

‘Should a borrower die before the loan is repaid, the insurance clears the balance outright, so the debt never passes to their children,’ she notes.

The partnership also offers buyers abroad vetted and background-checked property managers who can handle tenants and maintenance, so an absentee owner collects rental income without managing it directly.

Prices at the low end are accessible. A unit at NSSF’s Temangalo development starts from under Shs200m.

No Kenyan-based alternative can replicate this, since none has a stake in Ugandan real estate. For a diaspora worker planning an eventual return, that may be the entire pitch.

What NSSF cannot yet offer is the formal agreement letting years of contribution in one East African country count toward eligibility in another.

That gap is not mere foot-dragging. Both funds are provident funds, paying a single lump sum rather than a calculated pension, so there is no shared formula for a treaty to reconcile.

The existing transfer arrangement works only because it sidesteps that problem, handling one clean handover rather than two incompatible systems.

Globally, only a small share of migrants from developing countries carry pension coverage across borders at all, so Uganda’s incomplete solution is closer to the norm than a peculiar shortcoming.

Trust, not product design

Many Ugandans in Kenya don’t have work permits and cried foul of delayed IDs from NIRA, plus money physically carried across the border and lost, a risk taken specifically to dodge formal transfer channels.

‘People do this because they do not yet fully trust formal systems,’ Ayota acknowledges, ‘and rebuilding that trust is central to everything NSSF is trying to do.’

That means a product design alone may not determine whether the diaspora push succeeds. A dollar-denominated account with clean exit terms addresses a portfolio question.

It does not, on its own, address the position of someone who has already lost money trying to move it formally, or someone working without documentation who is wary that any interaction with an official Ugandan institution could draw attention to their status in Kenya.

Uganda’s Defence Attaché to Kenya McDans Kamugira and Ayota both encourage Ugandans in Kenya to regularise their paperwork rather than stay hidden, part of a broader effort to build the confidence formal savings systems depend on.

The regional race

Uganda is a relative latecomer here. Tanzania, with a diaspora exceeding seven million, already runs dollar-denominated diaspora pension accounts and channels an estimated $700m a year of remittances into formal investment.

Rwanda took a different route with Ejo Heza, a universal voluntary scheme open to any citizen anywhere, funded through mobile money and built mainly for domestic informal workers.

Kenya’s own NSSF reaches its diaspora largely through webinars with its government’s diaspora office.

Uganda’s effort sits at an earlier stage of the same experiment, with room to mature. But there is a bigger dream.

NSSF’s balance sheet grew by about $1.8b in a single year, from about $7b in June 2025 to $9.3b by June 2026.

Alongside Kenya’s NSSF, CPF Financial Services, Tanzania’s NSSF and other regional funds, it is one of eight institutions signed up to a proposed vehicle called the Africa Pension Fund, aiming to pool about 1 percent of each member’s balance sheet, close to $300m, once fully subscribed.

This is meant to draw further investment into real estate and infrastructure across East Africa.

That sum would not finance something the size of the roughly $1.2b Kampala-Jinja Expressway outright, but it is meant as anchor capital to attract larger investors and, Ayota believes, help keep regional borrowing costs down.

Together, NSSF’s diaspora account is a reasonable, still-evolving product, entering a market where established alternatives already exist and where trust, as much as design, will shape how far it goes.

Its long-term success will likely rest as much on continued engagement with diaspora communities on things like documentation, currency protection, and consistent service, as on any single feature of the account itself.