KAMPALA — A high-stakes petition to the Office of the President has pulled back the curtain on a suspected multiyear campaign of procurement sabotage and systemic corruption within the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, effectively freezing President Yoweri Museveni’s signature agricultural mechanization drive.
The whistleblower’s dossier, seen by this publication, details how a flagship program intended to transition Ugandan farmers from the hand hoe to the tractor has been held hostage for more than three years by irregular procurement cycles. The paralysis persists despite the president’s repeated public assertions that the nation’s agro-industrial transformation hinges entirely on these labor-saving technologies.
At the heart of the investigation is a pattern of “manipulated evaluation reports” and “exclusionary tactics” allegedly orchestrated by procurement committees within the ministry. The whistleblower alleges that these committees have consistently bypassed established legal frameworks to favor specific suppliers, a move that has triggered a backlash from international development partners.
According to the petition, the interference has become so pervasive that donors have begun withdrawing support, citing a fundamental breakdown in transparency and a refusal by ministry officials to adhere to competitive bidding standards.
The government’s blueprint for the scheme was ambitious: a strategic rollout of four-wheel tractors for large-scale production and two-wheel units for smallholder farmers, youth and women’s cooperatives. These assets were to be funneled through regional mechanization centers and district hubs to ensure shared access. Instead, those centers remain largely empty of new stock, leaving thousands of farmer organizations that applied for equipment in 2022 in a state of indefinite limbo.
The economic implications are severe. In regions like Northern Uganda—specifically Gulu, Lira and Soroti—where thousands of smallholders were earmarked for irrigation and post-harvest support, the lack of equipment has capped productivity and left farmers vulnerable to increasingly erratic climate patterns.
While ministry officials have previously attributed the delays to “verification bottlenecks” and “funding constraints,” the whistleblower’s account suggests a deliberate stalling of the process to benefit a select group of vendors. The letter claims that donor-funded procurement reports were flatly rejected by international partners after the ministry attempted to bypass equity principles, leading to the repeated cancellation of essential tractor orders.
The petition now lands on the president’s desk as a direct challenge to the government’s institutional integrity. The whistleblower is calling for a comprehensive “cleanup” of the ministry’s procurement wing and a restoration of donor confidence through enforced accountability.
For the farmers still waiting, the stalled program is no longer a matter of administrative delay—it is a test of whether the state can protect its most vital economic engine from the internal interests that currently hold it at a standstill.
