(Posted 30th October 2026)
Courtesy of Charles Miano / LinkedIn
For seven years, it was the most boring currency in East Africa. It barely flinched through COVID, through the Fed’s rate hikes, through a World Bank lending freeze. Every time our own shilling slid, someone in Nairobi would say: look at Uganda.
Then, in eight weeks, it lost a sixth of its value. The worst slide of the 144 currencies Bloomberg tracks.
Here is what makes it strange. It happened in the same year Uganda posted record reserves, record coffee exports and more than US$10bn in oil investment. On paper, it had never looked stronger.
So what went wrong in October?
My honest answer: almost nothing that started in October.
The real story begins a year earlier, in what looked like Uganda’s best currency year in a decade. Money poured in. Reserves doubled. Most of us, me included, read it as strength.
Some of it was. Some of it was borrowed. And borrowed calm looks exactly like earned calm, right up until the day it doesn’t.
Meanwhile, Kenya faced the same oil shock and the same Fed, and our shilling moved less than 1%. The reason isn’t the one most people would guess. Because the very thing that broke Uganda is quietly being rebuilt here.
I’ve unpacked how it happened, who pays the bill, and where I think the shilling goes next.
Read on ?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ugandas-shilling-cracked-kenyas-didnt-charles-miano-ip7wf/
