Privatizing your largest bank to foreigners certainly invites scrutiny if not criticism especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. A recent study asseses the sale of government-owned Uganda Commercial Bank to the South African Stanbic and suggests that the privatization has been relatively successful.
The portfolio of the privatized bank, which was cleaned prior to sale, remains fairly strong and profitability and credit growth are now on par with other Ugandan banks. Though market segmentation still is a concern, since Stanbic faces little or no direct competition in many remote areas, early results suggest that access to credit has improved for some hard-to-serve groups.
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