Parliament has demanded that more than 400,000 Ugandans who paid for electricity connections but have never been switched on either be connected without further delay or refunded their money, faulting the Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited (UEDCL) for sitting on applications it inherited from Umeme.
Public Accounts Committee (Central) chairperson Patrick Oshabe Nsamba said the applicants had paid Umeme for connections that were never completed before the company’s exit, yet remained in limbo more than a year after UEDCL took over distribution. He questioned why service had deteriorated when government had absorbed almost everything Umeme owned. “The infrastructure Umeme had was transferred to you. Nearly all the human resources were taken over. The toolboxes, the vehicles, everything was transferred. So where is the problem? Ugandans are concerned because their power is not coming,” Nsamba said.
The concerns were raised during Monday’s meeting between the committee, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, UEDCL and the generation sector, called to scrutinise the Auditor General’s reports and the performance of state agencies.
UEDCL acting managing director Jocelyn Rwakakooko, who has held the position since May, attributed the backlog to limited funding for maintaining substations inherited from the Umeme concession and to delays in procuring meters. She conceded that reliability had fallen since the handover, telling MPs that outages had climbed sharply and that average restoration time had risen from about 12 hours to nearly 20. “When we talk about how many times power goes off, we have also noticed that during the change it almost doubled,” Rwakakooko said.
She said the company had replaced or upgraded more than 800 transformers this year and was carrying out emergency replacement of another 300, alongside intensified clearing of vegetation along power lines, blaming years of underinvestment for overloaded substations and recurring failures.
Lawmakers were unconvinced that money was the obstacle. Wakiso District Woman MP Ethel Naluyima said it was unacceptable that blackouts had spread across the country after Umeme’s departure. “We don’t understand what is going on. Is UEDCL facing inadequate human resource, limited equipment? What is the challenge?” Naluyima asked. Mubende District Woman MP Hope Grania Nakazibwe and other members pressed the agency to explain the slow rollout despite committed financing.
Energy ministry permanent secretary Irene Bateebe said government had provided UEDCL with about US$129m, roughly Shs477b, across the 2025 and 2026 financial years, but that much of it was tied up in procuring transformers, substations and meters. She said the ministry was working with the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority to shorten procurement cycles for critical equipment, and that a competitive process to recruit a substantive managing director would be concluded within two months.
Bateebe traced part of the current strain to Cabinet’s 2022 decision not to renew Umeme’s 20-year concession, which she said prompted the company to scale back investment in its final years as government prepared for the buyout. She rejected suggestions that Umeme walked away with critical infrastructure, insisting the entire distribution network, its software and other operational assets were handed to UEDCL, with about 96% of Umeme’s workforce retained.
Earlier this year, government allocated Shs14.2b to the household electricity connection programme run through UEDCL, while the Rural Electrification Agency had procured more than 90,098 connection materials under African Development Bank and Islamic Development Bank
