The Uganda Alcohol Industry Association (UAIA), representing the country’s formal, licensed and tax-compliant producers, importers and distributors, has studied the directives issued by the Honourable Minister of Local Government on 10 August 2026.
We respect the objectives they pursue — protecting children, promoting productivity, and strengthening accountability and discipline — and we share them without reservation. The formal industry is a major employer, a significant contributor to the Treasury, and a partner with a direct stake in a healthy, productive population. We write in a constructive spirit, to help ensure the measures adopted deliver the outcomes intended.
We fully support the protection of persons under 18. The supply of alcohol to minors is indefensible; the formal industry already invests in age-verification and responsible retail, and we will expand these efforts and back strict enforcement against any operator who supplies a child. We equally support firm action against the illicit trade, this sector’s greatest threat. Research from Euromonitor indicates that close to 67% of alcohol consumed in Uganda is illicit or unrecorded: crude waragi, sachets and informal brews outside all licensing, taxation, quality control and any operating-hour rule. The formal industry is that trade’s principal victim, not its beneficiary.
It is because we share these goals that we respectfully ask for reconsideration of the 3:00 p.m. opening rule and of arrest or closure tied to it. We welcome the Minister’s own caveat that the measure is “subject to applicable national laws, licensing requirements and lawful local government regulations.” Currently, no national statute sets alcohol trading hours; under the Local Governments Act (Cap. 243), that power rests with district and urban councils through certified, gazetted ordinances and byelaws. Any enforcement should therefore rest on a valid legal instrument. Beyond legality, a uniform limit reaches only the compliant, taxed sector while the larger informal market is untouched — shifting daytime demand toward cheaper, unregulated and often unsafe alcohol, worsening the very harms it targets and eroding revenue, jobs, hospitality and tourism.
We propose instead: concentrating enforcement on the illicit trade, with industry support through traceability; support for lawful, locally calibrated council ordinances; industry-funded responsible-consumption and age-verification programmes; and alcohol-awareness education.
UAIA and its members want the same Uganda the Honourable Minister envisions — productive, disciplined and protective of its children. We ask only that the measures be lawful, evidence-based and genuinely effective, and that the formal industry be engaged as the partner it wishes to be.