CMA at 30: Three CEOs, One Institution, and a Market Built from Scratch

As the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) marks 30 years with a milestone celebration scheduled for Thursday, 8th October 2026; the three people who have led it, Japheth Katto, Keith Kalyegira, and Josephine Okui Ossiya, sit at different points on the same arc: Founding, Consolidation, Scaling. Together, their stories tell how Uganda built a market from scratch, and where it is headed next.

In January 1998, the Capital Markets Authority occupied the ‘zero floor’ (basement) of the Bank of Uganda’s new building. The space was modest. So was the headcount. Two technical staff seconded from the Bank of Uganda’s Domestic Financial Markets Department, Stephen Kaboyo and Simon Rutega, had been holding fort, supported in a part-time capacity by Wasswa Kajubi.

The first full-time employee at CMA, in the literal sense, was Geoffrey Karema, who had moved across from a messenger’s role at the central bank. When Japheth Katto walked in as the new Chief Executive Officer, he was, by his own telling, mistakenly issued employee identification number one. The “real number one,” he is quick to point out, was Karema.

That small administrative slip captures something true about CMA’s beginnings. The institution was being assembled in real time by a handful of people, under a board chaired by Governor Emeritus Leo Kibirango (the former Governor of the Bank of Uganda (BOU)), that had to take on far more operational responsibility than a board normally would. There was simply nobody else to do the work.

The Governor of BOU at the time was Charles Kikonyogo, who also sat on the board. He was keen for CMA to be an independent institution and therefore supported the move outside of the central bank. This idea was also wholeheartedly supported by the then Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (PSST), the late Prof. Tumusiime Mutebile.