Open letter to the Minister. Mineral licensing moratorium: The law already has the tools

Honourable Minister, on August 27, your ministry stopped receiving, processing or granting new mineral rights for one month.

On October 27, after a month’s gap, it suspended new grants for three more months while it completes its Strategic Mineral Licensing by Design framework. Your concerns are real.

According to ministry figures, by June 30 the register held 497 exploration licences, but only five large-scale and three artisanal mining licences. Your Permanent Secretary has warned that some exploration licences serve as “a substitute for a production licence.”

I share your ambition that Uganda’s minerals should build industries, not fill export containers. My quarrel is with the remedy. Read against the Mining and Minerals Act, Cap. 159, the law is not the problem. Enforcement is.

**THE TOOLS ARE ALREADY IN THE ACT **

Section 30 lets the Minister put areas out to competitive bidding and award them to the bid most likely to secure “the expeditious and beneficial development” of the area.

Strategic minerals may be prescribed, and the Uganda National Mining Company exists to hold the state’s stake. Section 49(2) says the Minister “shall automatically cancel” a licence when rent is 14 days overdue.

Section 160 lets the ministry hold expired or surrendered ground before reopening it to applicants. Yet the ministry recently gave firms two weeks to clear arrears reportedly worth billions of shillings. That is not a gap in the law.

It is the law, unused. Value-addition conditions and decision deadlines are also in place. As I understand it, the ministry is not seeking a new law. That settles the matter. If the framework is to run on the existing Act, the Act’s tools are enough, and they can be used without stopping the sector.

COSTS AGAINST BENEFITS

The costs of the freeze are certain and immediate. Exploration programmes stand idle. State revenue is deferred. Artisanal miners who want to formalise and sell to the Bank of Uganda’s gold programme cannot get licences.

Ugandan explorers who bring ground to investors are shut out. Investors are told to wait, with no end date.

Then there is the issue of applicants who paid their fees and were granted licences after satisfying the ministry’s own approval process, yet whose licences have awaited the Minister’s signature for months.

Where a licence cycle ends on December 31, a holder may lose a year on a licence that was granted but never usable. What signal does it send to markets when the state approves, collects fees, then withholds the signature?

The intended benefits are real, but none depends on the freeze. A cleaner register needs a hold over disputed areas, not a national halt. Speculators are removed by cancelling idle and unpaid licences.

Strategic minerals can be allocated by tender under section 30. Value addition is already a licence condition. Every benefit sought is within reach of the current law. The costs buy nothing the law could not have delivered anyway.

Kilembe, a strategic copper mine that failed under the old law, was tendered competitively under the 2022 Act and produced Uganda’s first mineral production sharing agreement in March 2025.

Sukulu, a phosphate project of national strategic importance, and was commissioned in 2018, collapsed because strategic status was no substitute for proper structuring under a State-controlled process and rigorous due diligence.

The power sector shows the alternative. When it needed a pause, as with the recent hold on new variable renewable energy projects, it paused that segment, not the whole sector. Rules applied consistently by the Electricity Regulatory Authority carried project after project past feasibility. Mining deserves the same.

**AN ALTERNATIVE ROUTE **

This is not a plea for business as usual. Idle ground must be taken back and arrears collected. What must change is the method. A better route would be to:

1. Publish the findings of the review, or the report, that informed the first deferment.

2. Sign the licences already approved through the ministry’s own processes, and extend their terms by the time lost.

3. Resume receiving applications, timestamped, with each applicant’s priority kept.

4. Hold grants only over disputed areas, shown on a published map.

5. Enforce sections 49(2) and 160, and publish the results.

6. Tender strategic areas under section 30, keeping first-come, first-served for the rest.

7. Set a firm end date for the deferment. Your framework’s first principle is “Strategy Before Permits”.

The law offers a second: law before suspensions. The tools are already in the Act. The sector asks only that they be used.

Yours faithfully, the writer is a concerned citizen and an advisor in the mining industry.

[email protected]

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