Parliament Orders Action After URC Fails to Account for 394 Missing Railway Wagons

What the report says

Watchdog Uganda reported that Uganda Railways Corporation Managing Director Benon Kajuna recorded a statement with Parliament Police after URC officials failed to provide documents showing what had been done to trace 394 railway wagons reported missing from the Rift Valley Railways concession period. Kajuna and his team appeared on Thursday, 23 July 2026, before Parliament’s Committee on Physical Infrastructure, chaired by Mwine Mpaka, to answer issues raised in the Auditor General’s review of URC operations.

Committee members pressed URC over the missing rolling stock, which officials said included 113 Uganda Railways wagons and 281 Kenya Railways wagons. Geoffrey Sekamatte, URC’s principal mechanical engineer, linked the problem to RVR’s shift from manual wagon tracking to a digital system called Translogic, saying some untraced wagons were placed in a virtual station at Nyahururu in Kenya and later became hard to locate. Kajuna said wagons normally move across Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania under a tripartite arrangement, and that wagons missing for more than 90 days are treated as lost.

MPs also questioned whether the assets had been scrapped, whether Uganda could face liability to Kenya Railways, and why government had not been alerted earlier. The committee ordered URC to produce verifiable recovery records and a full inventory showing wagon locations and movements. When the documents were not presented, Kajuna was directed to record a police statement.

The hearing also covered wider URC challenges, including safety at railway crossings, limited locomotive availability, a reported Shs250.5 billion cumulative funding gap, and a request for Shs99 billion in counterpart funding for the Kampala–Malaba metre gauge railway rehabilitation project. The committee is expected to review URC’s submissions before reporting to Parliament.