COVER STORY | For a decade, President Yoweri Museveni has promised, and repeatedly proclaimed, Uganda’s arrival in the lower-middle-income club. The World Bank keeps saying not yet. Behind the numbers lies a deeper contest over growth, population, political legacy and who gets to define Uganda’s economic progress, reports Ronald Musoke.
For President Museveni, who has been in power uninterrupted for 40 straight years, Uganda’s journey to lower-middle-income status has become more than an economic target. It is a measure of distance travelled.
When he took the oath of office for a fifth consecutive five-year term in May 2016, Museveni promised that Uganda would attain middle-income status by 2020. The optimism was partly fuelled by an expected oil windfall, which the government expected by 2019. He told his outgoing Cabinet that Uganda’s economic prospects were about to change dramatically: oil money, he said, would allow the government to finance infrastructure without relying so heavily on borrowing.
But the deadline passed without the promised arrival. Then, six years later, Museveni declared victory. Addressing the nation on June 7, 2022, he said Uganda’s GDP per capita had reached US$1,046, above the US$1,036 threshold he cited for lower-middle-income status.
“We have now passed that figure. Congratulations,” he said. The declaration was important politically. Museveni presented it as fulfilment of Point Five of his ruling party, the NRM’s 10-Point Programme (the construction of an independent, self-sustaining national economy). But the celebration lasted only days before the numbers themselves became contested.
On June 30, 2022, the World Bank published its 19th Uganda Economic Update, a periodic report that the World Bank does for member countries to analyze recent macro-economic development, near-term outlook, and structural policy challenges.
Its calculation placed Uganda’s gross national income (GNI) per capita at about US$840, well below the World Bank’s lower-middle-income threshold. The Bank’s assessment was blunt: Uganda’s economy was growing too slowly, while its population was growing too quickly, and the country would therefore take longer to make the transition. The clash that followed was not merely between a President and an international financial institution. It was a clash between two ways of describing the same country.
The Bank that wouldn’t say “Congratulations”
The World Bank’s position was not that Uganda had made no progress. It was quite the opposite. Its 2022 classification statement acknowledged that Uganda’s GNI per capita had improved significantly over several decades. But it added a crucial caveat: progress had slowed in recent years while Uganda maintained a high population-growth rate. The bank said deeper reforms would be needed to accelerate GNI per capita.
To the World Bank, that distinction matters. Its classification system is not designed to measure how impressive Uganda’s economic growth has been since 1986. It asks a narrower question: what is the country’s income per person, using the same methodology applied across economies?
The Bank uses GNI per capita, rather than GDP per capita, and converts it into dollars using the so-called Atlas method—a “smoothing” technique used to gauge the size of member country economies and classify them by income level using GNI per capita in American dollars.
Its classification for 2022, based on FY2020/21 data, placed Uganda at US$840 and therefore in the low-income category. But the Bank’s resident economists said something broader too. Seven months before Museveni’s declaration, Richard Walker, then a World Bank senior economist and co-author of the Uganda Economic Update, had warned that Uganda was moving more slowly than its ambitions suggested.
“Even with higher growth prospects, per capita GDP will remain well below the target of the Third National Development Plan (NDPIII), meaning Uganda will now take longer to become a lower-middle-income country,” he said.
Then came the list of obstacles: “Significant uncertainty remains on the evolution of COVID-19; weather shocks are a perennial threat; while lower revenues, spending pressures and adjustments to the government’s debt profile could jeopardize Uganda’s hard-earned macroeconomic stability.”
Uganda’s statistical counterattack
The government did not accept the bank’s verdict. On July 6, 2022, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics’ (UBOS) executive director, Dr Chris Mukiza (PhD) told journalists that Uganda was already within the lower-middle-income threshold. He accused the World Bank of using the wrong parameters.
The government’s objection had several components. It argued that the World Bank was working with FY2020/21 data, whereas Museveni’s announcement relied on the more recent FY2021/22 figures. UBOS also challenged the population denominator. The World Bank had used a UN mid-year population estimate of 47.1 million for Uganda, while Uganda’s official projection for the same period was 42.4 million, a difference of 4.7 million people. That is not a minor statistical footnote.