The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Gone are the days when she was praised. While addressing mourners at the home of Kaweesi in Kulambiro on March 19, President Museveni singled out her docket as the bad apple in police.
She was already contending with intrigue and infighting within police, which sucked almost all resources from her docket, now she must contend with inter-agency fighting.
Reports have already started emerging that Police is having trouble with CMI and ISO over the case. And this, according to insiders, is only inevitable.
Both ISO and CMI have new bosses who must prove themselves to the appointing authority. Part of that involves being able to get the best intelligence to President Museveni’s desk. There is a lot of pressure, including from the President.
President Museveni made himself clear in a statement on his Facebook page on March 19:
He wrote: “I am beginning to find some of these offices redundant and action will be taken if you don’t clean up your conduct.”
Before that he had written: “For example with all the ISO operatives across the country in all the various levels, district, regional, parish, how is it that schools have ghost students, no medicine in health facilities and other such cases yet government spends money on them?”
This means that rather than share details of their investigations, the agencies are competing with each other.
At ISO, the Director General, Frank Bagyenda Kaka, has been struggling to settle in. One of his first decisions was to suspend all allowances, which upset almost every one at the institution. His work is also closely watched by Security Minister Lt.Gen. Henry Tumukunde. Sources at ISO say Tumukunde fell out with the former ISO boss, Ronnie Balya, partly because the latter failed to submit to him. Balya was fired.
It appears, his successor is keen not to repeat Balya’s mistakes. So, sources say, Tumukunde enjoys a good relationship with Kaka. He has been making numerous visits to ISO—something he did not do quite often when Balya was in charge. Sources say Kaka and Tumukunde are both patronised by President Museveni’s influential brother, Gen. Caleb Akandwanaho aka Salim Saleh.
Should Bagyenda get information, he is most likely to call Tumukunde first before he submits it to police. It is a public secret that there is no love lost between Lt. Gen. Tumukunde and Gen. Kayihura.
Away from ISO, there is CMI, which insider sources say, appears to be on top of the Kaweesi murder case. But even with CMI, the new boss, Col. Able Kandiho, will be looking to prove himself and not to feed Kayihura’s success. Already, there is unease about CMI within police. Sources say, Akullo is trying to be diplomatic to get everybody to work together but these efforts are not attracting a lot of optimism. By presstime, sources knowledgeable about her team said it had not done any work of professional nature about the case.
The last successful investigation in which government managed to secure successful prosecutions appears to have been the investigation into the 2010 Kampala twin bombings. And the difference between this investigation and the one of the bombings, is that the police counterintelligence team and other units were not encumbered by the sort of intrigue that has plagued the institution in the recent past.
On top of this, all other government security agencies cooperated well and there was immense support from international institutions like the U.S.’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which followed the money trail and suspects’ contacts from UK, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and Uganda, an insider said. In these killings, Uganda is on its own.
Stakes are even higher for Kayihura. Insider sources say Kaweesi had embarked on a mission to have the term of the police chief renewed before he died. That is why he was aggressively working on the image of police.
Unfortunately, the circumstances surrounding his death are mounting pressure on Kayihura. It has heightened already lingering sense of insecurity. And pressure is mounting over the investigation. Kaweesi was the 12th person to be murdered in similar circumstances. Police is yet to have any of the suspects in these cases successfully prosecuted.
In the absence of who committed this heinous murder, the fear is being personified in the state by the worrying and frightened public. Could be that Idd Amin, Obote never killed but in the absence of such evidence, they were labelled monstrous regimes.