Uganda's mining fiscal regime, tested: royalties, levies and where the leakage sits

The Mining and Minerals Act 2022 sets royalties on gross value, provides for a state free-carry interest in large-scale operations, and sits alongside export levies designed to encourage domestic refining. On paper the package is competitive with regional peers.

Leakage happens at three points: undeclared artisanal production that never enters the formal chain, valuation disputes on assay and purity at the point of export, and re-export flow that arrives already refined and attracts little domestic charge.

Raising headline rates addresses none of those. Sampling assays independently, publishing receipts against export volumes and auditing refinery inputs address all three.

For a licensed operator the fiscal terms are workable and, at current prices, comfortably so. The genuine risk is regime instability driven by a public perception that the sector under-contributes. Operators that can evidence their own payments are best insulated from that pressure.