PROFILE: Who is Governor Emmanuel Mutebile?

Emmanuel Tumusiime Mutebile is among the top Bank of Uganda (BoU) officials who are currently facing Parliamentary Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (Cosase) over the irregular closure and sale of seven commercial banks since 1993 to 2017.

Mutebile is the Central Bank Governor.

Since November 2018, the committee headed by Bugweri County Member of Parliament has been probing BoU following a special report by the Auditor General on the closure of the banks.

Who is Mutebile?

Born 27 January, 1949 in Kabale District, Mutebile attended Kigezi College Butobere for his O-Level studies.He then attended Makerere College School in Kampala for his A-Level studies.

In 1970, he joined Makerere University, where he was elected president of the university Students’ Guild.

Mutebile was forced to flee Uganda in 1972 after he gave a speech publicly criticizing the expulsion of Asians from the country by former President Idi Amin. He fled to England via Tanzania, and was able to finish his studies at Durham University, graduating with an upper-second in Economics and Politics.

In October 1974, he began his post-graduate studies at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to East Africa. He entered the University of Dar es Salaam to lecture and conduct research while pursuing his doctorate in economics. In 2009, Nkumba University, a private university based in Nkumba near Entebbe, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree in recognition of his “great contribution towards the development of Uganda’s financial sector”.

Between the year 1979 and 1984, Mutebile was appointed to several government positions in Uganda ranging from deputy principal secretary to the president at State House in 1979, to undersecretary in the ministry of planning in 1981 where he rose to senior economist and then chief economist in 1984. In 1992, he was appointed permanent secretary to the newly combined ministry of finance planning & economic development, a merger that he had advocated while working under Minister of Finance Gerald Ssendaula.

He was first appointed Governor Bank of Uganda on 1 January 2001 and was re-appointed for a second five-year term on 1 January 2006. In December 2015, he was re-appointed for a fourth five-year term, effective 12 January 2016.

He is the longest serving chief executive in the Central Bank’s history.

He is credited with many of the sound economic policies adopted by the Uganda government at the urging of the central bank during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.