On 24 January 2002, crowds gathered for a celebration on the banks of the Nile River. Just north of the town of Jinja, in the east African country of Uganda, diplomats, bilateral and multilateral agency representatives, citizens, Members of Parliament, and the President of Uganda all congregated for what was thought to be the beginning of the construction of a new 250-megawatt (MW) hydroelectric dam – the Bujagali dam.

The location of the ground-breaking ceremony held historical significance. In 1907, a young Winston Churchill, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Colonies, stood about ten kilometres downstream and reflected on the potential for Uganda to become an industrial force if the waters of the Nile could be harnessed for electric power (Churchill 1989 [1908]). By 1954, the colonial authority saw the first phase of its Ugandan hydroelectric-vision fulfilled when the Owen Falls Dam (now named the Nalubaale dam) was inaugurated in a ceremony presided over by Queen Elizabeth II. The vision of Uganda becoming a regional electricity superpower has not yet materialized, however. The Nalubaale dam remained the only major source of electricity in the country until 2012. Six decades later, despite years of effort to improve electricity access and to reform the sector, Uganda had the unenviable reputation as having one of the lowest levels of access to electricity in the world (IEA 2011). Accordingly, the inauguration ceremony for the Bujagali dam in 2002 was supposed to represent a turning point in what had been a painfully long period of poor and unreliable access to electricity in the country. Between 1971 and 1979, the period of Idi Amin's reign in Uganda, the number of electricity consumers dropped from 69,500 to 60,950 (Uganda Electricity Board 1996; 1999). During the height of civil conflict in Uganda (1979 to 1986) the number of individual consumers increased to over 105,000, but two years after President Museveni took power in 1986, the country had only 80,795 consumers.

President Yoweri Museveni was the last of the dignitaries to speak at the inauguration ceremony. While other presenters praised Museveni's leadership, persistence and vision in executing the dam, Museveni had sat sternly, showing little emotion. It turned out he was in no mood for celebration or praise.