We are on the last stretch to the January 15, 2026, election. In a few days, all the news will be about opposition running battles with the police and army, tear gas, cracked skulls, bullets, several killed and injured, arrests, and the vote count nightmare.
So before the window closes, let us slip in the boring bit about development and making Uganda rich, a follow-up to last week’s “Economic federo now for Uganda. Now!”, about economic decentralisation. From the economic district or province, we must take our quest for prosperity down to the city.
A citification fever has gripped Uganda. We have changed the letterheads and repainted town halls. But for the average resident of Lira or Kabale, the change has been cosmetic. We have created glorified towns that still look to Kampala to fix a pothole.
If we are to avoid creating a string of expensive, dysfunctional urban sprawls, Uganda must pivot to a charter city model.
Typical Ugandan cities, like Gulu or Mbale today, are just basically “Municipality 2.0”. It follows the same national laws, uses the same centralised tax structures, and waits for the same budget disbursements from the Treasury. It drains the budget, rather than building wealth.
What’s this charter city? Picture Arua or Jinja not as mere towns, but as semi-autonomous zones with their own charters, a unique set of rules tailored to their specific strengths. They would have the power to set their own business licensing fees, create fast-track building codes, and manage civil service incentives without waiting for a ministry signature in Kampala.
Some direct ways for how they could finally create wealth. Massive social changes occur the moment a town finally becomes a city. On a visit to Equator Seeds in Gulu, a manager told me something mind-bending: the moment Gulu was named a city, residents began eating more rice. Why? Because if you live in a city, you feel pressure to eat like a city person. You partly move away from traditional tubers and roots that take hours to prepare and towards rice, the ultimate urban fast food.
This identity consumption can be exploited for massive economic gain. If the city government recognises the shift, it can build a rice value chain, offering incentives for millers and packaging plants to process rice within the city limits, ensuring the urban shift fuels local jobs rather than imports.
Then came what I call the Great Chicken Epiphany. On a visit to Ugachick in Magigye, they told me they discovered that one of the most significant predictors of frozen chicken consumption is the construction of apartments. In a traditional town, dinner can be a blood sport. To eat chicken, you must purchase a live bird, chase it around the garden, endure the feathery chaos, and perform the “assassination” behind the kitchen. Then pluck feathers, and cut it up. It can take even 90 minutes.
Put that person into a third-floor apartment, and the ritual collapses. There is no garden, and chasing a chicken through a tiled corridor is socially frowned upon and perilous. The apartment dweller happily pays for the convenience of the freezer and buys frozen chicken.
Constructing high-density apartments creates a new consumer class that demands steady electricity, freezers, and processed foods.
To spark these machines of consumption, Uganda needs a partnership of players who share in the risks and rewards. The private investor provides seed capital; the central government adds a matching grant worth just over a quarter of the total; the city government contributes land and the authority to fast-track permits, while the local economic district supplies labour and the social licence to operate.
Profits are split to ensure that the entire system stays balanced. The investor takes the lion’s share, 60 per cent, as yields on capital. The local economic district receives 15 per cent, which it channels into a trust to fund small businesses and vocational training. The city government also takes 15 per cent, ploughing it back into services such as waste collection and street lighting. The central government in Kampala gets 10 per cent, which it places in a sinking fund to repay its initial grant, turning the contribution into a self-replenishing investment.
For a city like Arua, the charter should focus on its role as a regional logistics gateway. Instead of being merely a transit point for trucks heading to the DRC or South Sudan, Arua should have the power to draft a free trade charter. This would allow for the duty-free assembly of goods-such as electronics, farm tools, and solar kits-within the city limits. By the time a product hits the DRC border, it is “Made in Arua, Uganda”, creating thousands of value-added jobs.
The chicken is in the freezer. It is time we built the apartments and infrastructure to keep it there.