Sunday Blackouts: UEDCL’s Weekly Power Ritual That Leaves Ugandans in the Dark-Musamali Arnold Freeman

Every Sunday, as churches fill and families gather, a familiar darkness descends across parts of Uganda. UEDCL’s planned shutdowns have become a weekly ritual. Power vanishes for hours—sometimes from morning until evening—turning what should be a day of rest into a day of frustration, lost income, and disrupted lives.

Businesses that rely on Sunday trade suffer most. Market vendors, salons, restaurants, and small workshops watch perishable goods spoil and customers walk away. Students preparing for Monday exams sit in darkness. Patients on home oxygen or those needing refrigerated medicine face real risks. Families cook over charcoal they can barely afford while generators roar in the few homes that can run them.

UEDCL insists these are necessary maintenance works to keep an ageing network alive. Fair enough. Infrastructure needs care. But why must it almost always fall on Sundays? Why do the same areas repeatedly lose power on the one day many Ugandans expect relative reliability? Why do notices sometimes arrive late, or fail to reach entire communities?

The pattern raises hard questions. Is the grid so fragile that routine work cannot be spread across weekdays or done in shorter, staggered windows? Are there enough skilled teams and equipment to reduce the frequency and duration of these outages? Or has Sunday simply become the convenient default because fewer complaints are expected when offices are closed?

Ugandans pay some of the highest electricity tariffs in the region. In return, they deserve more than apologetic tweets and “we regret the inconvenience” messages. They deserve a clear plan: timelines for network upgrades, transparent schedules published well in advance, and measurable reductions in outage hours. Maintenance is essential. Turning every Sunday into a national blackout is not.

Until UEDCL treats reliable power as a right rather than a privilege that vanishes once a week, the lights will keep going out—and public patience will keep running low.

— Musamali Arnold Freeman

Investigative Journalist