When Idi Amin was overthrown in April 1979 by Tanzanian forces and Ugandan exile units, he left behind an economy that had been systematically dismantled over eight years of misrule. The GDP had fallen by over 40 percent from 1971 levels. The Asian business community that had built much of Uganda’s commercial and manufacturing sector had been expelled in 1972, leaving enterprises that were seized by Amin’s associates and run into the ground. Infrastructure — roads, telecommunications, power generation — had deteriorated from the standard of the immediate post-independence period to a condition of advanced neglect. The treasury was empty, the currency devalued to near-worthlessness, and the national debt had multiplied several times over.
The expulsion of the Asians and its consequences
The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community in August 1972 — Amin gave approximately 80,000 people of South Asian descent ninety days to leave the country — is among the most consequential single economic policy decisions in East African history. The Asian community that Amin expelled had built the majority of Uganda’s retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and professional services infrastructure over three generations. They owned the cotton ginneries, the textile mills, the tea-packing factories, the pharmacies, the insurance companies, and the accounting firms. Their departure destroyed these enterprises within months.
The businesses seized by Amin’s associates — which he distributed to military officers and political loyalists as rewards for their support — were typically run without accounting discipline, without market knowledge, and without the technical skills that their former owners had accumulated over decades. Within two years of the expulsion, most of the seized businesses had failed, with their physical assets stripped and their working capital consumed. The manufacturing capacity that had taken three generations to build was destroyed in a decade.
The international response to the expulsion included the freezing of British aid and the withdrawal of many bilateral development programmes, further constricting the resources available to what remained of the Ugandan state. The consequential damage extended to coffee exports — Uganda’s primary foreign exchange earner — which suffered from deteriorating infrastructure, disrupted logistics, and the corruption that prevented export revenue from returning to productive use.
The Obote II period and continued instability
The overthrow of Amin did not immediately produce stability. Milton Obote, restored to power in the 1980 elections, presided over a period of brutal counter-insurgency operations in the Luwero Triangle — a campaign against Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army that killed an estimated 100,000–500,000 civilians and further destroyed the economic and social infrastructure of central Uganda. The period from 1980 to 1986 added new layers of destruction to the Amin-era damage and is sometimes referred to, with tragic precision, as Obote II — a second period of state violence that the Ugandan people experienced in their lifetimes.
Coffee production, which had briefly recovered after Amin’s fall, collapsed again as the Luwero conflict disrupted farming and transportation in Uganda’s most productive coffee-growing areas. The economic conditions of the early 1980s — hyperinflation, currency black markets, physical insecurity, breakdown of commercial relationships — created the conditions that the NRA resistance movement exploited in building its support base among a population that had experienced a decade and a half of state predation.
The Museveni recovery: structural adjustment and growth
Yoweri Museveni’s capture of Kampala in January 1986 and the establishment of the National Resistance Movement government initiated Uganda’s economic recovery — a recovery that was, in its first decade, one of the more dramatic turnarounds in sub-Saharan African economic history. The combination of restored physical security, economic liberalisation, and engagement with International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment programmes produced annual GDP growth rates of 6–8 percent through the late 1980s and 1990s, from the extraordinarily depressed base of the post-Amin economy.
The partial return of the expelled Asian community — invited back by Museveni’s government in the early 1990s — restored some of the commercial expertise and capital that the expulsion had destroyed, though the community that returned was smaller and the properties that were restored were typically in poor condition after two decades of mismanagement. Coffee exports recovered substantially through the 1990s as agricultural infrastructure was rehabilitated and world coffee prices rose. The tourism sector — including gorilla trekking, established at Bwindi in 1993 — began generating foreign exchange revenue that diversified Uganda’s export base away from its historical dependence on coffee.
The gorilla tourism sector as an economic recovery instrument
The establishment of gorilla tourism as a significant contributor to Uganda’s foreign exchange earnings is one of the cleaner success stories of the post-Amin economic recovery. The high per-visitor revenue of gorilla trekking permits, the employment multiplier effects in the southwestern region, and the international attention that gorilla conservation attracted to Uganda as a tourism destination all contributed to an economic and reputational recovery from the Amin period that was relatively rapid by the standards of post-conflict economies.
The connection between economic recovery and conservation is direct: the political stability and institutional capacity that allowed the Uganda Wildlife Authority to develop the gorilla tourism programme were themselves products of the economic recovery that Museveni’s government’s policies facilitated. Conservation in conditions of political instability and economic collapse — as the DRC example illustrates continuously — is extraordinarily difficult. The relative stability of Uganda since 1986 is a precondition of everything that gorilla conservation in Bwindi has achieved.
