Revenue collection’s role in customs could be changing to trade facilitation. What does that mean to the future of customs?
This is a healthy trend. We need to rely more on domestic revenues rather than taxes from imports. Globally, the focus is on trade facilitation and border control. The days when URA would heavily rely on taxes collected from imports are slowly vanishing.

This financial year, we expect to collect about 36 per cent of the total revenue from customs. And we are going to do this from 23 per cent of dutiable imports. So, yes we have to facilitate trade because that has a direct bearing on our economy and revenue generation.

So as a country it is a healthy trend for us to be relying more and more on domestic taxes than on imported revenues. In developed economies like in Europe, customs contribute less than 2 per cent of the total revenues collected. And there is nothing wrong with that.

So with the evolution of the role of customs aren’t you bothered that it will worsen the country’s tax base?
Not at all. As more internal investments crops up and the economy continues to grow, there shouldn’t be any worry. Investments that are popping up now will sustain the future of Uganda by creating jobs. And once that happens many people will pay taxes. I am very comfortable about that and as a country we are on walking the path of Industrialisation. We are already manufacturing and exporting a few things. For example we are exporting 260 containers of tiles and we consuming about 40 per cent of that here. This is good news because it means that the money that we use to spend to go to China and India to import tiles remains here. This means so much.

We are seeing a shift from other markets in the region to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). From the revenue perspective, how much is being accrued from this new market?
In the last financial year we exported Shs390nillion worth of goods to DRC. And we could do more than this because this figure excludes the informal cross border trade.

So, DRC presents a big market for us. We have the longest border line with DRC and we are even able to reach Central African Republic, so our products can go there as well.
The issue now is for us to position ourselves to partake the regional markets and opportunities therein. Traditionally we exported to DRC beer, cement and soft drinks, we can still do more with agricultural products such as rice and sugar.