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By the time I meet Prof Sudi Nangoli at Lake Victoria Hotel in Entebbe, the humidity and dryness outside are still noticeable, but the tree-shaded setting gives the afternoon a different feel.

Over lunch, the conversation turns to an institution that has been part of Uganda’s story for more than a century.

Prof Nangoli believes leading the Uganda Printing and Publishing Corporation (UPPC) is more than occupying the office of managing director. It is an exercise in stewardship, one that requires balancing the weight of history with the demands of a rapidly changing business and technological environment.

Prof Nangoli is a strategic and business management scholar with experience in academia, leadership and entrepreneurship. His academic and management background now meets the demands of leading one of Uganda’s oldest public institutions

‘Leading UPPC is both a privilege and a profound responsibility,’ Prof Nangoli says.

An institution such as the UPPC, he argues, does more than print documents.

‘It preserves the nation’s memory, safeguards public information, and supports government service delivery,’ he says. ‘As the publisher of the Uganda Gazette, we are custodians of Uganda’s official legal record and documentary heritage.’

Prof Nangoli says this makes leadership less about occupying a position and more about preserving an institution while preparing it for what lies ahead.

‘To me, leadership is about stewardship. It is about honouring the legacy built over generations while preparing the corporation for the future.’

Consequently, his vision is to see the UPPC become a modern, innovative and commercially sustainable public enterprise capable of delivering printing, publishing and security printing services while maintaining its public mandate.

Changing the culture

When he assumed office, Prof Nangoli’s priority was not machines or equipment. It was people. ‘Institutions do not change because new machines are installed; they change because people embrace a shared vision.’

The transformation agenda therefore began with organisational culture, governance, accountability and staff. The UPPC introduced stronger performance management systems, improved internal communication and sought to create an environment in which innovation and continuous improvement could take root.

Prof Nangoli is sold on the idea that transformation cannot be reduced to a single project or a change of equipment.

He sees transformation as ‘not an event [but] a continuous journey.’ As such, he credits the progress at the corporation to the collective effort of its employees, while pointing to operational improvements, customer service, and digital transformation as some of the areas where change has been pursued.

‘Today, the Uganda Gazette is published consistently and on schedule, ensuring compliance with statutory requirements and improving access to official government information,’ he says.

Prof Nangoli is not oblivious to the fact that an institution cannot transform without investing in its people.

His approach reflects his wider leadership philosophy. ‘I have always believed that leadership is about serving others and enabling them to succeed. Leadership is not confined to the managing director’s office; it should be demonstrated at every level of the organisation.’

Going online

Perhaps one of the clearest signs of the changing UPPC is the move from paper-based services towards digital platforms. Prof Nangoli describes digital transformation as fundamental to the corporation’s future competitiveness.

The corporation, he adds, has introduced the electronic Uganda Gazette, digitised thousands of historical Gazette records and established an online customer service portal.

Clients can submit Gazette notices and printing orders electronically without physically visiting UPPC offices. For an institution whose history is closely tied to printed documents, the transition marks an important shift in how it delivers services.

The issue of digital transformation runs so deep that it occupies most of the time we are having our main course. Prof Nangoli appears to take to it as well as he does traditional foods.

After digging into the steamed matooke, he discloses that the internal use of digital systems has also improved workflow management, communication, and operational efficiency.

Externally, he adds, the changes have reduced turnaround times, improved accessibility and enhanced customer convenience.

‘Our ambition is to become a fully integrated digital publishing and printing enterprise that combines technological innovation with the trusted quality UPPC has delivered for more than a century,’ he says.

Since the Gazette contains information that affects citizens, businesses and institutions, including laws, regulations, public appointments, statutory notices and land-related publications, Prof Nangoli says it shouldn’t be ignored.

‘[The Gazette] contains information that directly affects individuals, businesses and institutions,’ he says, adding: ‘An informed citizenry is essential to a well-functioning democracy.’

A case for recapitalisation

As we wash down our elaborate main course with a drink, Prof Nangoli shifts attention to the fact that the transformation agenda he is so passionate about requires investment.

‘Recapitalisation is not simply about acquiring new printing equipment; it is about securing the future of a strategic national institution,’ he says.

The UPPC’s responsibilities include government communication, security printing, legal publishing and preservation of Uganda’s documentary heritage.

To continue fulfilling those roles, Prof Nangoli argues that the corporation must keep pace with changes in the printing industry. The industry, he says, is evolving through automation, digital printing and security technologies.

Without modern equipment, production becomes more expensive, turnaround times increase, and competitiveness can suffer.

Recapitalisation is also an investment in local industrial capacity, with Prof Nangoli offering that ‘a stronger Uganda must reduce dependence on foreign printing, retain printing value within the local economy, create employment opportunities and strengthen national capacity in strategic printing services.’

Nangoli’s leadership lesson

As we get to our dessert of local fruits, Prof Nangoli returns to what he considers the foundation of institutional transformation: people.

His leadership philosophy is rooted in servant leadership, mentorship, open communication, and continuous learning.

His profile similarly identifies selfless and servant leadership and mentorship as central to his approach.

He encourages employees to pursue professional growth, embrace innovation and take ownership of UPPC’s mission.

‘My role is to create an environment where talented people can thrive, collaborate and deliver exceptional service,’ he says.

‘When employees are empowered and motivated, organisational excellence becomes a natural outcome.’

That emphasis on people also explains why his five-year vision is not limited to machines and financial performance.

He wants a modern, digitally enabled and financially sustainable institution, with modernised production infrastructure, expanded security-printing capabilities, stronger digital services, diversified revenue streams and deeper strategic partnerships. But he also wants a skilled workforce capable of adapting to new technologies.

‘Success, for us, will not simply be measured by financial performance,’ he says. ‘It will be measured by the value we create for government, businesses and citizens through reliable service, innovation and operational excellence.’

The legacy question

As the lunch conversation draws towards its conclusion, the discussion returns to the institution’s history. The UPPC has existed for more than 123 years. For Prof Nangoli, the challenge is to ensure that the institution’s long history does not become a barrier to its future.

He wants future generations to inherit an organisation with modern systems, strong governance, skilled professionals, and a culture of continuous improvement. More importantly, he wants to leave behind people who can continue the work.

‘Perhaps most importantly, I hope to have contributed to developing leaders who will continue advancing the Corporation long after my tenure,’ he says. ‘Institutions endure when they invest in people, embrace change and remain faithful to their purpose.’

His measure of a successful tenure is therefore not simply whether new systems are installed or whether revenues grow.

It is whether a historic public institution can emerge stronger, more innovative and better prepared for a future in which printing, publishing, information management and document security are changing rapidly.

‘If history remembers that we preserved Uganda’s documentary heritage, modernised a historic institution, strengthened public confidence and positioned UPPC as a catalyst for national development, then I will consider that a meaningful legacy,’ Prof Nangoli says.

‘This book presents a young person seeing the world with fresh yet discerning eyes. In Stages, Suubi is seeking centredness in an unstable world. From personal journeys throughout and between continents, Suubi asserts the freedom to be themselves, on their own terms. stages is a thoughtful, rigorous, and heartfelt collection of a loving voice,’ writes Tracie Morris, author of human/nature.

The title ‘stages’ is in lowercase lettering. This style by poet Tramaine Suubi belongs to a canon of poets such as Lucille Clifton and Bell Hooks, to name but two, who intentionally use or used all lowercase letters (a technique known as decapitalisation or lowercaseness) to create visual flow, convey humility, challenge grammatical rules, or disrupt poetic traditions. Suubi, despite the non-disruptive meaning of her name, is no different. Her words may not come screaming from the tops of their commonplace rendering, but they do carry. So loud are they that even the most soundproof reader will be knocked for a loop by their visceral passion. To put a healthy spin on Shakespeare, they are all sound and fury; signifying everything.

Under the section ‘yellow dwarf’, the poem ‘nostalgia’ carries an audible fragrance related to the distinct scent of familiarity.

‘release/all the bull/andthe shit, making/the best mistakes/of this one lie, smoked/screams show it all, such/decadence in wildly/heated choices, the joyful/sorrows of this decade, the stale/nights,the rotten days/they all absorb and refract/the muchness of this roaring/decade, the yearning lances/through us all’

This poem, quoted in its entirety, is an emotional reflection on letting go of past burdens, embracing the chaotic mistakes of youth, and feeling the intense highs and lows of an unforgettable era. Allow what you may have experienced in life to be animated by a yearning for the good old days, which were actually bad. Nostalgia does not come with 20/20 vision, especially when a roseate lens makes for greater nostalgic value.

Poems about nostalgia do not have a single specific sub-genre name, but they are broadly referred to as nostalgic poetry, poems of retrospection, or reflective poetry. They are bittersweet, summoning meaning by unbraiding the bitter from the sweet to make sense of the hairy situation we often find ourselves in when we reflect on an impersonal world.

The collection’s second section, expansively titled ‘red giant’, seems to carry a different sort of constitution. One that is more contemporary.

The poem ‘mine’ has a proprietorial ring to it that will surely displace the ring in suffering, if its words are listened to: ‘body/wars against itself/every day/am unwitting hazard/to my self/an implosion in progress/how do you neautralize/the enemy/you cannot/hear,see,smell,taste,touch/how do you neautralize/the self’

This poem is a powerful reflection on chronic illness, autoimmune disease, or severe mental health struggles. It captures the exhausting reality of a person whose own body or mind feels like a combat zone. However, it does not stop there. It takes ownership of the situation. That’s why the poem is titled ‘mine’.

The theme of self-acceptance that comes with the speaker claiming or owning the situation serves as a powerful mechanism for healing, reclaiming identity, and defying external expectations.

Rather than projecting an idealised version of the self, the poem presents a ‘warts and all’ reality and, by the very token of this reality, the speaker explores the vulnerable journey of confronting one’s lot in life, embracing physical or emotional flaws, and consenting to live in one’s absolute truth.

In the sixth section of this searingly sincere literary offering, titled ‘proto star’, one is treated to more food for thought in the shape of emotionally munchable verse.

It serves as the perfect way to close this open-wound-but-healing poetry. And it does so, ever so confessionally, in stages.

Uganda is short roughly 2.4 million housing units, and even the government’s own housing strategy doesn’t promise to close that gap. It only aims to shrink it to 1.9 million by 2030. In 2025, lawmakers passed the Mortgage Refinance Institutions Act and the Building Control Act, both designed to bring cheaper, longer-term financing into housing and push mortgage rates down.

On the surface, Uganda should be a magnet for property investment because demand is enormous and supply is nowhere close to meeting it. Instead, the market is moving the other way. Developers complete one project and exit rather than reinvest. Bank financing rarely trickles down to ordinary home buyers. And a legal structure that has existed on paper for nearly a decade has never been used by a single company.

Consequently, the core issue isn’t a lack of housing demand, but a tax and financing system that extracts money from property at nearly every stage while offering little support to people trying to buy or invest in it.

Taxed at every turn

Property ownership in Uganda accumulates tax obligations continuously, from acquisition to disposal. Buying land triggers stamp duty and registration fees. Transactions can bring capital gains tax and withholding tax of 6.0 percent to 10 percent, plus value-added tax (VAT) of 18 percent depending on classification.

Construction adds import duty on materials and withholding tax owed to contractors. Rental income is taxed differently depending on whether the owner is an individual or a company, and when the property is eventually sold or transferred, capital gains tax applies once more.

‘So, in short, tax never really leaves the picture,’ Mr Ronald Kalema, a partner and head of tax practice, AF Mpanga Advocates, said in a discussion about the subject organised by the firm, adding that ‘throughout the cycle of the property ownership journey, there are taxes to think about.’

This kind of layering of multiple taxes along one chain of activity is damaging because the taxes compound. Economists understand that a transaction tax discourages buying and selling, a construction tax discourages building, and a disposal tax discourages exiting. Stacked together, they push investors toward inaction.

Inflated construction costs

Even setting taxation aside, building in Uganda is unusually expensive. A cement import ban meant to protect domestic manufacturers has instead produced something close to a monopoly.

‘At the moment, if you want to buy a bag of cement in Uganda, you’re paying $10 per bag,’ Marc Du Toit, the head of retail at Knight Frank Uganda, a property management firm, said. ‘Anywhere else in the world, you’re paying $5.’

And because Uganda is landlocked, imported materials pass through neighbouring countries’ ports and borders, adding about 30 percent in transport costs. Combined, Mr Du Toit said, construction here costs ’40 percent to 50 percent… higher than any of our neighbours.’

‘In Dar es Salaam and in Nairobi, a product of a studio apartment sells for $69,000 (Shs272m),’ he said. ‘In Uganda, that exact same product is on the market for $130,000 (Shs513m),’ he added.

Land ownership compounds the problem, though this one is more fixable. Because holding vacant land carries no cost, ‘land sits in a very select few hands,’ Mr Du Toit said, and those owners ‘are only willing to create liquidity in the market if they get their specific price.’

The problem is that when there’s no penalty for leaving an asset idle, owners feel no pressure to develop or release it. A tax on unimproved land value is one of the rare policies most economists broadly endorse, precisely because it can’t be avoided simply by doing nothing.

Land insecurity is also worsening. Reported fraud cases jumped from 397 in 2024 to 663 in 2025, a 67 percent increase, according to official police files, undermining investor confidence in titles.

Costly loans, for more than one reason

Layered on top of expensive construction is expensive borrowing. Shilling-denominated loan rates hovered near 19 percent through 2026, reaching about 18.73 percent in February, compared to just 11 to 13 percent in Kenya and Tanzania.

Part of the blame falls on large borrowers who exploit court delays to avoid repayment. Banks are businesses, not charities, so defaults by a few big borrowers push up borrowing costs for everyone else. This is risk-pooling working against the market, since lenders price loans on average risk across all borrowers rather than individually.

But that’s not the full picture. Bank of Uganda’s Governor Michael Atingi-Ego recently told a House committee that elevated rates also stem from heavy government borrowing, which competes with businesses and individuals for the same pool of domestic credit. He also noted that government delays in paying its own bills force businesses to borrow just to stay afloat, and some then struggle to repay, adding further strain to bank balance sheets.

In effect, part of the risk premium landlords absorb exists because the government is simultaneously competing for loans and delaying payment of its own bills.

Mr Du Toit estimates investors earn only 4 to 5 percent pre-tax returns on residential property in Uganda, versus 12 to 13 percent in comparable regional markets, a gap wide enough to send capital elsewhere.

A tax code that penalises proper structuring

Some of the dysfunction is self-inflicted.

‘As an individual, I pay 12 percent of my income as property tax,’ Mr Du Toit explained. ‘My dividends are tax-free… Now I take that same property, and I put it into a corporate structure. Effectively, my taxation rate is 30 percent.’

This discourages formal, well-governed corporate investment and violates a basic tax design principle and yet it is thought that taxation should be neutral regarding business structure.

Uganda’s system isn’t, and predictably, people choose whichever structure minimises their tax bill.

‘What is happening in the market,’ Mr Du Toit said, ‘is you’re seeing people syndicate… Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) is collecting their 12 percent, but there’s no governance, there’s no proper corporate structure.”

Mr Kalema pointed to the fact that Uganda has no legal framework for family or investment trusts, unlike Kenya, so ‘a family has to set up a company… even if that company is not really a trading company.’

The REIT that never launched

Nowhere is this disconnect clearer than with Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which let ordinary investors buy shares in large properties much like buying stock in a company. Uganda’s Capital Markets Authority finalised REIT regulations back in 2017. Nine years later, not one has launched.

Developers still depend on personal capital or short-term bank loans, precisely the financing gap REITs were meant to close. The obstacle is a single tax rule. Before a REIT can sell even one unit to one investor, the property must first be legally transferred into the trust. URA treats this as a cash sale, even though no money changes hands, and charges roughly 1.5 percent stamp duty on the property’s value upfront, a bill that scales with value and kills the economics before the REIT gets off the ground.

Kenya has already scaled this hurdle. Transfers into a Kenyan REIT are tax-exempt, the REIT itself pays no income tax, pay-outs aren’t taxed again, and the transfer skips value-added tax (VAT) entirely.

Uganda has actually built half of a workable policy already. A REIT that distributes at least 80 percent of its income to investors is exempt from tax on that income, reasonable next to the 90 percent thresholds used in the UK, Singapore, and the US. The catch is that no REIT has ever survived the entry tax long enough to benefit.

Notably, the Stamp Duty Act already waives duty for construction materials tied to industrial parks and free zones with $50 million-plus commitments, and exempts land transfers linked to government-approved strategic investments. This is proof that the taxman has already shown willingness to forgo stamp duty revenue for the right goal. That flexibility just hasn’t reached REITs.

Taxing revenue instead of profit

Uganda’s income tax system generally taxes profit, revenue minus costs, but rental income is treated differently.

‘I think rent, for rental tax, there is an embedded assumption you’re going to make a profit and you can’t tell us otherwise,’ Mr Kalema said.

‘For an individual, don’t tell us whether you took a mortgage and you’re paying Shs100,000 in mortgage costs, give us our 12 percent,’ he added.

A revenue-based tax behaves very differently from a profit-based one. It applies even to properties barely breaking even, potentially turning a marginal investment into a loss purely due to how the tax is structured.

Mr Du Toit connected this to what he called a flawed assumption: ‘the perception… is that landlords are wealthy… and let’s take from the golden goose.’

Fixing compliance

Rental tax provisions change more frequently than almost any other part of Uganda’s Income Tax Act.

‘If you look at what informs the amendments, it is usually the compliance of the players in the market,’ said John Mugaga, supervisor Real Estate Tax Office, Domestic Taxes Department at URA, pointing to landlords who under-declare income or mix up cash and accrual accounting to their advantage.

URA’s response has been EFRIS, the electronic invoicing system now being extended to property.

‘EFRIS is not a tax,’ Mugaga stressed. ‘It is just a conduit… through which the property owner and the URA reach the right tax,’ he added.

Mr Du Toit disagreed. ‘You cannot write a policy around a handful of illegal operators,’ he said, adding, ‘we are minimising the ability of the country to generate income.’

There’s a broader principle here. Raising revenue by taxing a small group heavily, versus a large group lightly, tends to cause less economic distortion.

Restricting deductions across the board to catch a handful of non-compliant taxpayers penalises honest filers without meaningfully curbing informal activity.

What should change

None of this requires Uganda to overhaul its tax code. It needs rebalancing.

Mr Du Toit’s central recommendation is to begin taxing currently exempt categories like owner-occupied homes and vacant land; a holding cost on idle land, he argued, ‘will create liquidity’ and ‘growth.’

Mr Mugaga proposed cutting stamp duty, currently 1.5 percent, for first-time home buyers. Mr Kalema’s ask is fewer, clearer, more predictable rules.

For REITs, a template already exists: exempt only transfers into licensed trusts that meet the existing 80 percent pay-out requirement, with a cap or sunset clause so URA isn’t permanently forgoing revenue on an unproven market.

Investors aren’t avoiding Uganda because demand isn’t real, but because owning property there, from acquisition through construction, financing, rental, and eventual sale, carries more in tax, interest, and friction than the market can sustain.