There’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from having built your career inside the numbers before ever stepping in front of them. Eugine Mutekhele has that kind of confidence.

It shows not in bravado, but in the way he talks about risk, about customers, about an industry that most Ugandans still don’t fully understand with the calm precision of someone who has spent nearly two decades reading the fine print so that, eventually, he could rewrite it.

Mutekhele’s path to the top office at Jubilee Insurance Uganda didn’t begin in insurance at all. It began at PwC, where he joined as a fresh associate back in 2009, cutting his teeth on audits before an unusual detour took him to the African Trade Insurance Agency, managing a portfolio stacked with AAA-rated investors.

It was an early lesson in what it means to protect value rather than just chase it, a theme that would follow him for the rest of his career.

Then came the years abroad. A stint in the UK, deepening his craft as a manager at PwC London. A return to the continent by way of Rwanda, where he essentially built a risk assurance practice from scratch, IT security audits, internal reviews, the unglamorous architecture that keeps institutions honest.

By the time he made senior manager back in Kenya, Mutekhele had accumulated something rarer than a job title, a genuinely pan-African view of how financial institutions work, and where they quietly break.

The move into insurance proper came in 2021, when he took the CFO seat for Old Mutual Kenya’s life business.

Three years later, he crossed over to Jubilee first as CFO for the health division, then, in December 2025, into the deputy CEO’s chair at Jubilee Insurance Uganda.

It was a short stay in that seat. Within months, as Jubilee moved to merge its life and health businesses into a single unified entity, Mutekhele stepped up to lead it first in an acting capacity, and now as substantive Chief Executive Officer.

He inherited the top job at an interesting moment. Uganda’s insurance penetration remains stubbornly low by most recent estimates, only about 500,000 of the country’s 45 million people carry any form of health cover, and barely a tenth of the population understands how insurance even works.

For most executives, that’s a discouraging statistic. For Mutekhele, it reads more like a mandate.

He’s been direct with brokers about a simple principle guiding his push into digital underwriting and claims tracking: a strong product that never reaches its market delivers no value at all. It’s a line that could have come from a finance textbook, except that Mutekhele has spent his whole career on the side of the business that builds the infrastructure quite literally, given his original training in electronic and computer engineering long before he became the one selling the vision.

That engineering degree from JKUAT, paired later with an MSc in professional accountancy from the University of London and an ACCA qualification, gives him an unusual dual fluency, he can talk claims ratios with actuaries in the morning and talk systems architecture with the tech team in the afternoon.

It’s part of why the next digital platform, Jubilee’s push to modernize how policies are bought, tracked, and paid for has become such a personal project for him.

But numbers were never really the point for Mutekhele. Ask him about the merger that unified Jubilee’s life and health arms in Uganda, and he doesn’t talk about balance sheets first, he talks about the customer who no longer has to explain their situation twice to two different companies.

Agents, he’s noted, are now equipped to sell both life and medical cover under one roof, which means a client dealing with financial and medical concerns at once finally has a single point of contact instead of two. It’s an instinct closer to relief than corporate messaging.

It’s that same instinct reading a spreadsheet and seeing a person behind it that seems to define his leadership.

When Jubilee partnered with the Buganda Kingdom to roll out a low-cost health plan priced within reach of ordinary households, Mutekhele framed it as a way of sparing families from having to sell assets or borrow at punishing rates just to access care. Not the language of a man optimizing for market share. The language of someone who has watched, up close, what happens when protection isn’t there.

There’s a version of this story that’s simply about credentials; PwC, Old Mutual, three countries, an alphabet of qualifications. But the more interesting version is about timing and temperament; an engineer-turned-accountant-turned-insurer who arrived at the top of Jubilee Uganda just as the company itself was being rebuilt into something new, and who seems, by every account, entirely unbothered by how much rebuilding remains.

For an industry that still has to convince most of a country it’s worth the investment, that kind of steadiness might be exactly the asset it needs.