Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) President Jimmy Akena has dismissed key economic claims made by President Museveni in the 2025/26 national budget speech.
He accused the National Resistance Movement (NRM) of misrepresenting statistics and revising history to claim undue credit for Uganda’s economic progress.
Addressing journalists in Kampala , Akena challenged Museveni’s assertion that Uganda’s economy had expanded 15 times since 1986 and that tax rates had fallen significantly.
“Those statistics are not true.You cannot claim massive economic growth while ignoring the collapse in the value of the shilling,”said Akena.
He cited the depreciation of the Uganda shilling, noting that the exchange rate had fallen from Shs 14 to the dollar in the late 1980s to over Shs 3,600 today what he described as a depreciation of more than 25,000%.
“If the currency has lost that much value, how can we claim the economy has grown 55 times?” he asked.
Akena also accused Museveni of rewriting history to present himself as the architect of Uganda’s liberalized economy.
He argued that the NRM initially adopted a fixed exchange rate and only embraced liberalization later, building on economic policies inherited from UPC.
“The first NRM budget fixed the exchange rate at Shs 1,400 to the dollar. The liberalization narrative came later, and even then, they inherited groundwork laid by UPC,” Akena said.
He highlighted UPC-era policies such as the Revised Recovery Programme, which he said were rebranded by the NRM as the Rehabilitation and Development Plan.
“Without those programs, Uganda would have been in a total mess,” he added.
Akena said the UPC would make “economic truth-telling” a central theme of its 2026 campaign.
“We are going to dismantle NRM’s quasi-economic theories and expose them for what they are,” he said.
He labeled the NRM leadership as “fraudsters” who had “fluked their way through 38 years” of governance.
“Now is the time for truth,” he stated.