Museveni Hosts Pearl to Cape Expedition Team, Urges Swift Local Bus & Battery Production

What the report says

SoftPower News reports that President Yoweri Museveni on Wednesday hosted a luncheon at State House, Entebbe, for the team behind the Presidential Pearl to Cape Expedition 2025. According to the outlet, the event was held to honour the completion of a trans-African journey by Uganda’s locally manufactured Kayoola electric bus, which Museveni described as an important step for the country’s industrialisation and innovation agenda.

The report says Museveni used the occasion to call for faster local production of buses and batteries, linking the expedition’s success to Uganda’s broader ambition to build domestic manufacturing capacity. The named project, the Pearl to Cape Expedition, appears to have been designed to demonstrate the capability of a Ugandan-made electric bus over a long-distance route across the continent, though the provided excerpt does not give the full itinerary, duration, technical results or the names of the team members involved.

The development matters because Uganda has been promoting value addition and local industrial production, including in transport technology. Kiira Motors Corporation, the state-backed company associated with the Kayoola bus brand, has previously been part of Uganda’s effort to move from importing finished vehicles toward local assembly and eventual component production. Battery production is especially significant for electric mobility because it affects cost, supply security and the depth of local manufacturing.

The available SoftPower excerpt is limited, and the linked page text supplied alongside it appears to carry an unrelated title about Ebola in DR Congo. This summary therefore relies only on the headline, URL and snippet attributed to SoftPower News.