President Museveni has insisted that Uganda must get rid of exporting raw minerals like this one. “I banned the export of minerals from Uganda and personally I banned them,” he said
When President Yoweri Museveni imposed a ban on the export of unprocessed minerals, his message was blunt and uncompromising: Uganda would no longer be “a quarry for other people’s industries.”
“Africa produces what it does not consume and consumes what it does not produce… We must get rid of the production of raw minerals. I banned the export of minerals from Uganda, and personally, I banned them,” said Museveni in 2012 as he banned the export of unprocessed minerals.
Museveni has observed the disparity between full-scale value addition and raw exports.
“Our iron ore is the purest in the world. It is 70% pure. So, you need like one and a half tons to make a ton of steel. Now a ton of steel costs $700. Somebody gives you $47 on your wealth, the wealth of your people, and he gets $700 from it. And all the jobs, your children have no jobs. I can’t be part of that treachery,” he vowed.
Until recently, there were two factories processing ore into steel. In November, President Museveni and his Kenyan counterpart, William Ruto, launched the construction of the Devki Mega Steel Plant in Tororo.
The plant is owned by a Kenyan-based investor, Dr Narenda Raval, who is expected to attract $500 million and create 15,000 jobs. For President Museveni, that shows that his ban is working, noting that most of the iron from Uganda was exported to Kenya previously.
Prices for minerals like iron tend to fluctuate in the international markets, but experts like Joseph Enyimu, the Commissioner for Economic Development, Policy and Research says exporting unprocessed minerals yields far lower returns than domestic processing. That’s why government has resisted a policy reversal on the mineral export ban.
“Uganda has banned the export of unprocessed minerals. We are not a business of trading unprocessed minerals. Local value addition is an imperative; the room for negotiation is closed,” Enyimu told our reporter early this year.
Vincent Kedi, Assistant Commissioner, Licensing and Administration at the Ministry of Energy’s Mineral Development Programme, said the export ban has both opportunity and friction.
“Our priority is to harness mineral resources for employment creation and local content development,” he said.
However, Kedi agrees with others who have criticized the government’s ban without supporting the industry to attain the value addition ambition.
“Financing is a major challenge. Some projects have completed feasibility studies but are still struggling with financial closure. Prices of some metals are hitting rock bottom. That is a disincentive to investors,” he said.
Years later, the question refuses to go away: Is the ban working—or is it running ahead of Uganda’s economic, technical, and institutional capacity?
Allan Agumya, the Director of Gecko Uganda, was one of the key exporters of iron ore to Kenya. He believes that the export ban has negatively impacted the mining and mineral sector.
“When we used to export wolfram from Nyamuliro, we employed 1,500 miners. They were paid 15 million shillings daily. That money no longer goes there… Which industry in Uganda employs 1,500 workers and creates a trickle-down effect of 15 million shillings daily? Very few,” said Angumya, a member of the Miners’ Forum Uganda.
Agumya points out that Uganda’s minerals are geographically dispersed, unlike oil, which is concentrated in specific regions. Marble in Karamoja, iron in Kabale, and rare earth in Makutu, could, in theory, generate widespread economic benefits if fully exploited.
Yet, the export ban has left thousands of acres of mineral-rich land underutilized. He notes that few companies have ventured into mineral processing due to inconsistent power supply and lack of subsidies. “For example, he said Sino Mineral operates on generators, highlighting infrastructural challenges.
Agumya has not come to terms with the fact that Uganda maintains an export ban on marble, leaving huge reserves underground in Karamoja. Globally, he said, 70–80% of marble trade is in blocks, the very category banned from export.
“You are going to struggle for the 30% market space that you are left with, and you want to do it locally? The region doesn’t have a huge market for marble consumption. How are you going to attract investors?” Angumya questioned.
The mineral export ban reflects a classic tension in resource governance: the desire to protect national wealth versus the immediate economic benefits of trade.
On one hand, the ban aims to create a domestic processing industry, generate employment, and capture the full value of Uganda’s mineral wealth.
On the other hand, it risks stifling investment, reducing exports, and limiting income for communities that previously depended on mining.
The experiences of local companies like Geko Minerals suggest that without complementary measures—such as infrastructure development, subsidies, and investment incentives- the ban may achieve limited success in promoting value addition.
The policy’s long-term impact on Uganda’s mining sector will depend on the government’s ability to create an enabling environment.
Across government, academia, and the extractives sector, even supporters of the ban now concede that while the logic of value addition is sound, the execution has been surrounded with contradictions, gaps, and unintended consequences.
Dr. Paul Bagabo, a Development Economist and Senior Officer at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), is among those who strongly defend the president’s position, at least in economic terms.
“In economic terms, nothing beats value addition. Because we’re trying to skim the cream,” Bagabo argues. He frames the export ban as part of a broader historical pattern, comparing it to Uganda’s earlier attempts to move up value chains in agriculture, services, and education.
“We’ve tried it in other sectors—agriculture, education, even health. We have centres of excellence, and the money is there, even if we don’t always see it directly.” For him, the ban reflects a rational bet. “The countries making the most money out of this sector don’t even have minerals. They don’t have the resource, but they’re doing well out of it.”
From an investment perspective, he says the numbers speak for themselves. “At the exploration level, for every dollar you invest, you might get back 0.9. If you are lucky. But when you move up the value chain, you’re getting anywhere between 1.3 and 1.6 dollars back.” Bagabo explained Museveni’s argument for maintaining the ban.
On the other hand, Dr. Bagabo admitted in an interview that the path Uganda has chosen is slow, painful, and politically risky. “Your GDP will go down before it goes up. You need to invest in things that won’t return now.” Explained Bagabo, formerly a policy analyst at the Ministry of Finance.
He draws parallels with China’s long industrial march; he urged the current generation of Ugandans to be prepared for sacrifice.
“When President Xi came in, he didn’t start yesterday. It’s taken 20 years. China was deliberate. Now every dollar they invest gives them 13 to 17 percent returns. Some generations have to sacrifice. Even us, we might not see it in the next 20 years.”
While the export ban goes on, analysts, including Bagabo, say Uganda has not built technical capacity for local value addition. Others have wondered why some miners continue to mine as the ban is maintained. Bagabo, at one of the meetings in Kampala, shared what he discovered in Nyamuriro’s wolfram mines.
“They showed me seven or ten sacks of wolfram and said, ‘The ban doesn’t allow us to export these.’ But they are working every day. Logically, I would think that some are being smuggled out,” he said.
He explained that the contradiction of banning exports without domestic processing capacity sounded controversial.
“If the ban is a good thing economically, then where do we find ourselves now, when we cannot add value to certain minerals?” he warned.
Paul Bagabo’s Natural Resources Governance Institute (NRGI) and Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE) in March hosted a national dialogue on unlocking mineral value addition to support Uganda’s 10-fold growth strategy, where the export ban and value addition debate.
One of the speakers was Dr Theophilus Acheampong, an economist and political risk analyst. His key message was that an export ban doesn’t equal value addition. “Having an export ban does not necessarily translate into value addition if you don’t put in place the needed structural value unlockers,” Acheampong argued that not all the countries with minerals will need to add value.
“The reality is that it’s not going to happen for most.” He suggested the need for countries like Uganda to consider competitiveness. He said competitiveness depends on six hard realities: resource certainty, electricity, logistics, skills, governance, and ESG standards.
“You have to benchmark yourself. And when you do that, you begin to see you’re not as competitive as you think.” Acheampong’s analysis of African countries positioned for value addition does not include Uganda. “Unfortunately, I don’t have Uganda on this list.”
His illustration for Uganda’s case was based on aluminum. “To produce one ton of aluminum, you need 13 to 15 megawatt hours of electricity.”
Contextually, the amount of power requires an aluminum value addition factory was enough electricity to power over 100,000 homes in Africa.
“Where is that electricity going to come from?” he asked.
Besides electricity and other costs, Dr Bagabo observes that the mining sector is the most taxed.
“You can’t have 15 different taxes before mining even starts. Environmental compliance costs can reach $10,000 before production begins. Can we remove that cost and say the government will do it?”
Without such reforms, he warns, value addition may collapse under its own weight. “If they invest in value addition, they’ll have no money to explore or mine.”
From expert analysis, Uganda’s mineral export ban is not irrational; economically, it is compelling, and the desire to break from colonial extraction models is politically understandable.
However, Acheampong cautioned that without electricity, skills, finance, regulatory clarity, and patient capital, the ban risks becoming a bottleneck rather than a catalyst.
Bagabo agrees with Acheampong. “Those are the details we now need to work on.” Others have suggested that Uganda should have quantified the amount of minerals it has before pushing the value addition agenda.
Until Uganda resolves those details, quantifying reserves, defining what “value addition” actually means for each mineral, fixing taxes, and building capacity, the ban may continue to hurt before it helps, fueling smuggling, deterring investment, and squeezing miners caught between policy ambition and economic reality.
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