My attention is drawn to the UK’s Financial Times 6th August 2026 edition story themed “How Intel came back from the brink". Intel is the American company that, for half a century, made the chips that ran the world's computers. It pioneered the microprocessor and, through most of the 1990s and 2000s, was synonymous with cutting-edge silicon. However, in recent times Intel missed the shift to mobile computing, then missed the shift to the graphics-processing chips that now power artificial intelligence. That miss has been costly. The semiconductor maker has struggled to keep up in the artificial intelligence boom, ceding ground to rivals such as Nvidia and AMD. Nvidia now designs the General Processing Units (GPUs) that train AI models and is the world's biggest company, with a market capitalisation of over $5.4 trillion at the time of authoring this. Beyond Nvidia, Intel is also racing to keep pace with Taiwan's TSMC, which fabricates chips for nearly everyone, and with equipment and design players like the Netherlands' ASML, the world's sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, South Korea's giant Samsung, United Kingdom's Arm, etc.; the invisible architecture behind every AI product on earth.

Faced with the risk of America's last homegrown advanced chipmaker collapsing, the Trump administration last year acted. It converted $9 billion in federal grants into a 10% equity stake in Intel, becoming the company's largest shareholder; funds originally committed as CHIPS Act support under the Biden administration but restructured into ownership rather than a handout. The rescue was not improvised generosity. It was targeted at one firm, in one industry, deemed a matter of national security, the only U.S. company still capable of manufacturing leading-edge chips domestically. In exchange for public money, the public got a stake. A year later, Intel's turnaround looks real: the company has posted about a 25% jump in sales in its latest earnings report, and the federal government's roughly 10% stake is now worth around $40 billion.

By way of juxtaposition, compare the Intel case study with how Uganda handles corporate distress. Government bailouts here-whether for struggling parastatals, politically connected private firms, or “strategic” investors who arrive with promises of jobs- routinely happen off the back of ministerial discretion rather than any published criteria. There is no equivalent of the American CHIPS Act: no law or policy setting out which sectors qualify for state support, what conditions attach to public money, or what the taxpayer gets back when a company recovers. Bailouts appear as line items, loan guarantees, or tax waivers negotiated quietly, often without Parliament's scrutiny until after the fact.

Three lessons stand out. First, Uganda needs a legal framework, even a short one, defining when the state may intervene to rescue a private company, tied to demonstrable public interest such as employment scale, supply-chain criticality, or strategic sectors like energy or agro-processing, not political proximity. Second, public rescue money should come with public upside. Washington took equity, not just a grant; if Intel's shares had nosedived, taxpayers would have shared the loss, but since the company recovered, taxpayers now hold a stake worth billions. Uganda's bailouts, by contrast, are frequently one-directional: the state absorbs the risk, and the company's owners keep the equity. Third, transparency and oversight matter. The Intel deal was announced publicly, debated in the American press, and scrutinised by economists questioning whether government should be picking winners at all. Ugandan bailouts rarely receive that level of public airing, leaving citizens unable to judge whether their money was well spent.

None of this means Uganda should copy America's approach wholesale; government equity stakes carry real risks of favouritism and mission creep, too. But the principle worth borrowing is discipline: clear eligibility, a defined public return, and open scrutiny. Without that framework, every bailout will keep looking less like industrial policy and more like patronage.