Nyakisharara Airport: Is it a vision or an illusion?
For his years in power, President Museveni has retailed himself as Uganda’s vision bearer, crediting his government for lifting the country out of economic and political doldrums. He barrelled to power in 1986, aged 41, and unveiled a 10-point programme that was birthed during a five-year guerrilla war, to reboot the country. Except for northern and eastern regions , his administration promptly restored security, pursued liberal economic policies that powered industries to end scarcity of basic goods and wrote a new Constitution that credentialed Mr Museveni as a democrat. Now at 81, his pet project is Uganda’s socio-economic transformation, a rebranding of points 5 and 6 in the original bush-time blueprint on building an independent, integrated and self-sustaining economy and improving social services, respectively.
If the government gets its acts together, underailed, it projects a 10-fold growth of the economy to $500b by 2040, powered mainly by industrialisation, agro-processing, foreign direct investment, petro-dollars windfall and digital revenues. Kicking this ambition to life is partially premised on an accelerated development of requisite backbone infrastructure – roads, rail, electricity, digital ecosystems and airports – allocated Shs8.8 trillion in the 2026/27 budget, which starts on July 1. Among the top-tier projects that Mr Museveni envisions is building from scratch a world-class modern international airport in Nyakisharara, about 10 kilometres from Mbarara City centre in his backyard. The facility is planned to have two 5.5-kilomtre runways and another 3.5-kilomtre runway for exclusive VIP use, making it one of the largest in the world.
Besides the scale and scope, Museveni’s February 2026 sales pitch of the project as responding to God’s creative positioning of the site in global architecture, left open the question of whether the initiative underlines vision or is an illusion. “Why such a big airport [in] the hitherto remote area (Nyakisharara) of Uganda?” State House quoted him as having said, “It is all on account of the hitherto unknown factor of the way the globe was arranged by God …” The President had for the second time met representatives of a Ugandan-Chinese consortium, who assured him that they would mobilise their own finances to bankroll Nyakisharara International Airport on a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model and it would be ready by 2030.
That is four years away, which is half the period taken to build the $309 million (Shs1.2 trillion) smaller Kabalega International Airport in Hoima, with a shorter 3.5-kilometre runway, and fully funded through loan from UK Export Finance and Standard Chartered Bank. The proponents of Nyakisharara International Airport by contrast offered no proof of assured financing, demonstrated no footprint in airport development, and the firms they fronted to do the intended works are no older than five years, according to official records. In addition, netizens called out the artistic impression they shared with the President for its striking similarity with the futuristic design of the existing Chengdu Tianfu International Airport in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province. There is no feasibility study for the potentially multi-million-dollar project, raising questions on the basis the President relied upon to give it a nod.
Nonetheless, Mr Museveni, according to a State House statement, said Nyakisharara is the mid-point between Latin America and South-east Asia, specifically Brazil and China, making it a strategic central logistical and refuelling hub between the two big global economies. Then he tasked reappointed Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja to fast-track the formalities so the project, which he never mentioned in his inauguration, State-of-the-Nation and Budget speeches, gains wings to fly. In a briefing to the premier early this year, a one Eddie Kisitu Sengendo, a shareholder/director in Hamster Business Solutions Limited and consultant for the Nyakisharara project, said: “This facility is actually aimed at snatching about 30 percent of traffic from the rest of the airports known.”
There are roughly 1,200-1,300 aerodromes in the world designated as international airports, with Uganda, since 1951, having one at Entebbe, whose annual passenger traffic has risen to 2.4 million over 34 years. Mr Sengendo did not provide reasons for his lofty assumptions that one-third of global air traffic would drift to Nyakisharara and our computations based on aviation practices, show that flying between Brazil and China via western Uganda would neither be shorter nor cheaper, contrary to President Museveni’s assertion.
He said there is growing trade and communication between the two “affluent” countries, and having travellers to either destination transit through Nyakisharara would be 14-22 hours shorter than using alternative routes via Europe, saving on fuel and layovers. “However, their route of communication is wholly irrational and uneconomic. It is South America, over the Atlantic, over Europe, Asia etc to China and back. It takes 34-42 hours,” he noted, adding, “Yet, if someone was to come from Brazil, refuel at Nyakisharara, it would take him 20 hours of flying time.
That is nine hours from Latin America to Nyakisharara and 11 hours from Nyakisharara to China, he noted. The President did not disclose the source of his data, but our calculations based on industry rules paint a different picture about the viability of the project (canvassed in detail in tomorrow’s instalment of this new series). There is also no explanation about the specials available in Mbarara to pull passenger traffic and cargo volumes to Nyakisharara higher than offered on the Entebbe peninsula where, with ongoing upgrade, the number of arriving and departing passengers per year are projected to gross 6 million by 2033.
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