By Our Reporter
According to reports, Police have summoned about half a dozen lawmakers and top finance ministry bureaucrats to assist with investigations into alleged corruption in national budgeting over the years.
The individuals are to appear at the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) headquarters in Kibuli, a Kampala suburb, today and it is unclear whether detectives will question them as suspects or potential witnesses.
According to Daily Monitor, multiple sources confirmed that President Museveni ordered the investigations after his State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA) on Thursday, during which Members of Parliaments publicly rejected his amnesty proposal for suspected thieves in government.
The head of State had said he possessed evidence incriminating Finance and Parliament officials in transactional budgeting; legislators allegedly colluded with accounting officers to make allocations of public resources in exchange for kickbacks.
He did not name the suspects but disclosed that the facts before him confirmed long-standing rumors he had heard of graft at the heart of government in the annual appropriation of taxpayers’ money.
Shortly after the revelations, the President however broached the idea of a possible amnesty for the perpetrators, but the majority of the MPs assembled at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds in Kampala stopped him mid-sentence with a disapproving roar: No000!
“You want blood?” he asked in an apparent reference to action. “Yessss,” they bellowed. Then Mr Museveni retorted, “Okay … we shall go ahead”, but with a caveat that those to face the law would be the “dishonest” — individuals who dip their fingers in the cookie jar intentionally.
He likened these to Ugandan activists – in his words traitors – behind exposés of graft in government, despite publicly conceding that the vice is a cancer to Uganda’s progress. A third column of corrupt officials that the President, however, said requires “counselling” to chaperon them to the right path are those who do wrong by “mistake”.
“If you punish every mistake, who will you work with?” he said despite drawing a sword of blood for the “dishonestly” corrupt. The forward march he promised in action against thieving officials didn’t take long to unfold. Hours later, Mr Museveni ordered CID, working closely with DDP’s Office, to get to the bottom of the claims to prosecute incriminated suspects.
We were unable by press time to establish the particulars of the lawmakers and Finance officials to face questioning today. Investigators hope the information they get will lead to the next persons of interest, or determine the course of the inquiries which, according to knowledgeable sources, are to be expanded to other government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).
CID Director Tom Magambo was unavailable by press time. While Ms Claire Nabakka, the deputy Police spokesperson, could neither confirm nor deny, saying she needed to “consult” before speaking on the matter. Finance Ministry spokesman Jim Mugunga said he was unaware that police had summoned some of their staff while Parliament Spokesman Chris Obore was unreachable.
On Thursday, President Museveni had said that he had been “hearing stories that there is a racket from … [the] Ministry of Finance, they are bringing accounting officers of ministries to come to Parliament working with some people, to provide certain funds, provided they [officials] take a share”.
“I didn’t believe it [at first], but now I have proof. So, therefore, really the corrupt are like foreigners [because] some of these foreigners do not know Uganda,” he said, “I am very sorry for them because they do not know what they are doing. I pity those people who support them [because] they don’t know how strong we are.”
His revelations lifted the lid off years of investigations by intelligence agencies, including the Internal Security Organisation (ISO), which in dossiers prepared for him reported alleged clandestine practice of some lawmakers taking money in exchange for heftier budget allocations to MDAs.
Sources close to the inquiries in earlier briefings to this newspaper said that implicated lawmakers call the extortion game “kicking the ball to the wall”, a euphemism for kickback likened to a bounce of a ball to the kicker if booted against a barrier.
Accounting officers – permanent secretaries or under-secretaries, chief executive officers and chief administrative officers – who “know how to kick the ball” receive generous budgetary allocations to their entities and muted questioning when before House accountability committees, the source said.
Conversely, MDAs headed by incorruptible officials reportedly face budget approval headaches and their accounting are most pummeled by accountability committees of the House.
This alleged budget corruption, according to another source, is the reason the President asked Members of Parliament to stop altering the budget and only make recommendations to the budget which he said was his.
Some lawmakers upset over the comments pushed back, arguing that their role in the budget process was more than ceremonial.
