The Missing URC Ledger: Billions invested, assets unaccounted for

What the report says

Uganda’s railway asset record is presented in a news analysis by Uganda Radio Network, published by The Independent Uganda, as a long-running accounting gap stretching from the 1977 collapse of the East African Community to the present day. The report says the Uganda Railway Corporation was created after the breakup to manage the railway system, but decades of purchases, repairs and concessions left a fragmented paper trail that makes it difficult to trace where locomotives, wagons, coaches and other equipment ended up.

The article focuses on efforts in the early 1980s to inventory former East African Railways and Harbours assets. A joint working party meeting in Kampala in 1982, involving Kenyan and Ugandan officials, established a baseline for rolling stock allocation after the regional split. According to the report, Uganda received a much smaller share than Kenya, and the documents reviewed by URN did not explain the imbalance. The story also cites a Commonwealth-funded report from 1979 describing Uganda’s dependence on Kenyan engines for main-line operations and the limited condition of much of its fleet.

The analysis says Uganda later bought additional wagons, coaches and locomotives from countries including Belgium, India and East Germany, while also expanding Lake Victoria wagon-ferry capacity. It further notes that some steam engines once kept at Tororo were later dismantled and sold as scrap, leaving no preserved examples for the Jinja Railway Museum. The piece argues that the absence of a continuous asset ledger remains important because it complicates efforts to understand how much public money was invested and what remains of Uganda’s railway system today.