By the second decade of independence, Uganda’s economy groaned under the pressures of domestic misrule and international turbulence. This chapter traces the variety of popular and state reactions as price inflation and commodity shortages came to prevail. Some Ugandans experienced shortages as an affront to their ethical expectations about merit and redistribution; they accused their compatriots of misdeeds and demanded their government better manage the economy. In response, large domains of economic life were criminalized as the state tried to redirect trade toward avenues more easily taxed or regulated, including through an Economic Crimes Tribunal that indicted innumerable Ugandans. Yet, smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging proved especially bedeviling to the state, Drawing on a range of police investigations, trial records, and petitions, this chapter details the sorts of opportunistic exchanges and engagements that characterized Uganda in the 1970s, an improvisational mix of dissidence and claims-making, acquiescence and rebuke that radically challenged sovereignty and citizenship.

Beginning in the late colonial period, banking and money became a central interface between the state and its subjects, with Ugandans demanding greater access to credit. In the years after independence, the government responded to expectations of commercial liberty by using savings and loans to turn colonial subjects into credible citizens—dutiful producers of export value whose personal “banking habit” would serve the nation as a whole. Whether through the Bank of Uganda’s national currency or the Uganda Commercial Bank’s vans circling the countryside, economic citizenship tried to sidestep the nation’s lack of affective solidarities by weaving together monetary ties. For many, this was welcome, but simultaneously, these financial interdependencies limited exchange across territorial borders. As a result, some people—among them, Asians, migrants, and residents of the border regions—were cast as suspicious subverters of the nation-state. Rather than a question of merely inclusion or exclusion, this chapter shows that postcolonial citizenship worked through “enforced membership,” as national currency imposed inclusion within the state’s monopoly on valuation, sometimes with violent implications (as in the case of the 1972 expulsion of Ugandan Asians).