Ramathan Ggoobi (pictured), the Secretary to Treasury, has revealed that Uganda’s economy is performing well despite the political season and external shocks.
Appearing before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) today to respond to audit queries raised in the 2024/25 auditor General’s report, Ggoobi said Uganda’s economy is performing very well despite the shocks within and outside the country.
“I think it’s one of the few moments in the history of Uganda that we’ve had a stable economy during a political season. Not even the political business cycles would affect our performance as indicated by a number of indicators,” Ggoobi said, adding that the GDP continues to grow driven by all sectors in the economy; agriculture, manufacturing and the services are all growing.
“We expect the economy to turn in a growth of between 6.5 and 7 percent this fiscal year,” Ggoobi said.
Inflation stable
He revealed that the prices of goods and services are stable.
“The inflation has remained under control during the election year…We have been here; we know what happened in the elections before but this time the prices of goods and services are stable,” Ggoobi said, adding: “The inflation is at 3.1 percent and we expect it to reach an average of 3.5 percent for this fiscal year. Our target inflation in Uganda is 5 percent which shows you that we are within the target and even the situation out there can attest to that. Sometimes people don’t understand this until the prices rise. That’s when perhaps we understand the significance of controlling inflation.”
He added that the shilling is also stable and strong against major currencies. “It has been appreciating against the dollar and other major currencies mainly because of good performance of exports. At the end of last year, December, our export performance was at US$14.4 billion (UGX53.643Trn). Uganda has never in its history exported that magnitude of goods and services of US$14.4 billion dollars,” he said.
Ggoobi revealed that the financial account is also doing very well.
“We are getting in more inflows about 5.6 billion dollars of inflow of money from Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs); FDIs of about 3.56 billion dollars and also portfolio investors about 1.7 billion dollars. As a result, the shilling has remained very stable. The dollar is available to everybody. As a result of those things I’ve mentioned, our balance of payments registered a surplus at the end of October last year. A surplus of 2.37 billion dollars. What does that mean? That Uganda, with all our partners we relate with, Uganda got in more money than what went out of Uganda by 2.37 billion dollars,” he revealed, adding: “…the state of the economy is quite good and we hope it will remain good despite some of the geopolitical challenges which are happening in the world. We have enough buffers to keep it stable.”
