There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from having sat on every side of the table, the reporter’s chair, the boardroom seat and the regulator’s desk.

Olive Birungi Lumonya has occupied all three, and it shows in the way she carries herself as Deputy Director General of the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA): unhurried, precise, and entirely unbothered by rooms that might intimidate a less seasoned operator.

Her story does not begin at Entebbe. It begins in the newsroom. In 1992, Lumonya graduated in the very first cohort of Makerere University’s Bachelor of Mass Communication programme, stepping straight into a reporter’s role at the once-influential Weekly Topic, before moving on to The New Vision.

It was an era when Uganda’s press was finding its voice, and Lumonya was learning hers, asking questions, chasing facts, and developing the instinct for institutional detail that would later serve her in boardrooms far removed from a newsroom floor.

The pivot to the corporate world came at Nile Breweries in Jinja, where she built a name for herself as brand and marketing manager, learning the discipline of building institutions people trust rather than merely reporting on them.

From there, she carried that expertise to the National Social Security Fund as head of marketing and communications, and later to SOS Children’s Villages Uganda, where she rose to national director, sharpening a leadership style rooted as much in empathy as in strategy.

By the time the UCAA Board went looking for a new deputy director general in 2021, Lumonya was hardly a stranger to the aviation regulator. She had already served on board between 2014 and 2020, giving her a governance-level understanding of the authority long before she was asked to help run it.

When the interviews were held that year, she outscored her nearest competitor by a wide margin, and in October 2021 she was handed a four-year contract to take up the post, an appointment she began that November, backed by an MBA from the Eastern and Southern African Management Institute, chartered marketer status, and a reputation for turning strategy into measurable outcomes.

In her present role, Lumonya oversees strategic planning and performance management across an authority tasked with keeping Uganda’s airspace compliant with international safety and security standards work that spans everything from readiness for global regulatory audits to budget implementation.

It is meticulous, high-stakes work, largely invisible to the travelling public until something goes wrong, which is precisely the point.

She has also used her platform to push a conversation that aviation in Africa has been slow to have. Speaking at events marking Women’s Day this year, Lumonya argued that when women take their place as pilots, engineers, regulators and entrepreneurs, they do more than fill seats, they strengthen institutions and build economic resilience.

With the substantive Director General on medical leave, Lumonya stepped into the acting role, a position she has now held for over a month, and one that recently put her in front of Parliament’s Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises Committee to answer for the authority’s affairs.

It is not a comfortable spot for any executive, but it is the kind of moment that tends to separate managers from leaders. Lumonya, characteristically, showed up and answered the questions.

Beyond Entebbe, she previously chaired the board of FINCA Uganda from 2018, a governance stint that added to her credentials as a certified balanced scorecard champion and African Board Fellow, the sort of pedigree that rarely makes headlines but quietly determines whether institutions function well or fail badly.

From a reporter’s notebook to the deputy’s chair at one of Uganda’s most technically demanding regulatory bodies, Lumonya’s career reads less like a straight line and more like a well-navigated flight path, deliberate course corrections, a few holding patterns, and a clear sense, throughout, of where she was headed