Joseph Mawejje

Uganda has recorded slow progress in ensuring that majority of Ugandan households have access to electricity. This has been partly due to the limited exploitation of renewable sources that can offer alternative sources of energy. In 2011, for example, renewable energy other than from hydro sources accounted for 12 percent of total electricity generation. Data from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics indicate that access to electricity by Ugandans has improved modestly from 9.5 per cent in 2002 to 14 per cent in 2013. Consequently current electricity access rates are some of the lowest in Sub Saharan Africa. There are also challenges of ensuring that majority of rural dwellers get access to electricity.   Energy access is unequally distributed across the country and the provision of electricity has been limited to mainly urban and semi-urban areas. While 40 percent of urban households have access to electricity, progress in the rural areas has been much slower. In 2013 a whopping 95.

After the Minister of Finance read the national budget on June 12 th 2014, there has been a raging debate on how to finance Uganda’s UGX 11,088 billion proposed tax revenue.   Most of the protagonists have been against the reinstatement of VAT on agricultural services. Within this realm, the New Vision, July 30, 2014 carried an article describing how Coca Cola—a leading multinational producer of soft drinks—was negotiating a tax waiver in lieu for providing logistical support to transport medical equipment from the USA to Uganda. The equipment will be provided by Medsave—a USA based medical charity. Specifically, Coca cola was requesting for exemption of excise duty on all soda products and reduction to 5% of the excise duty on mineral water.   In exchange, it was reported, the company would ship to Uganda “donated medical equipment worth US$20 million from the USA.” The arguments given by Coca Cola, that: 1) taxes hurt the soft drinks sector greatly because customers are low i