The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
The revelations surrounding ISO’s situation have raised a lot of concerns and criticism also because President Yoweri Museveni assigned the body the role of leading the fight against corruption.
This role was handed to ISO amongst the resolutions of the leadership retreat for members of the ruling party Central Executive Committee (CEC), Ministers and Permanent Secretaries.
The retreat took place at the National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi from July 25 to Aug.1 this year. Here, officials agreed upon 12 resolutions. Fighting corruption is listed as number 10.
And under fighting corruption, they listed 11 ways of how they would go about it. Of these, number 10 reads; “ISO to take the lead in detecting and investigating cases of corruption, including reinforcing its work especially through training, improved strategic reporting, and close engagement with accounting officers at various levels.”
When officials raised concerns that the Inspectorate of Government (IGG) lacked enough capacity to fight corruption, President Museveni suggested that ISO comes in especially because it has structures up to the grassroots level.
ISO Director General, Brig.Ronnie Balya, was at the retreat and made a presentation. “Corruption can lead to loss of legitimacy and trust in government,” Balya said, “Because of corruption, disenchanted citizens can resort to mass demonstrations, violence and mob justice.”
He added; “In some countries; governments have collapsed because of this.”
All this good talk seems to have stayed here. Ever since, ISO was handed this role, five months ago, it is yet to post any results. The institution is also struggling to be relevant in the investigation of other crimes.
Our sources say that ISO chiefs have been trying to play a role in the investigation of the Lugogo shooting in which, Mathew Kanyamunyu is suspected to have shot Kenneth Akena, who died the following day as a result of the gunshot wound.
Apart from ISO and ESO, the other mainstream intelligence body is the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI), which falls directly under the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF).
Until the early 2000s, the three were the most revered intelligence gathering bodies. But they are increasingly becoming irrelevant because their budgets continues to be eaten into.
As they continue to struggle, the budget of Uganda police continues to grow. It hit Shs. 527 billion this financial year.
This is not a coincidence. The bosses of the intelligence bodies blame their current fate on Police Chief Gen. Kale Kayihura. Kale has been restructuring police. One of his restructurings saw him grow the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) into the Criminal Intelligence and Investigations Department (CIID).
In 2013, funding for CID investigations was just shs 4.85 billion. As of last year, CIID got over Shs. 20 billion and this year, it was demanding Shs. 50 billion, almost the entire budget of ISO.
“Due to inadequate funding, CIID is incapacitated and cannot investigate and conclude all cases registered,” police noted in its pitch for more cash.
Indeed, the talk in security circles is that the entire ISO budget was swallowed by police. Critics say that while funding police is not a bad thing, weaning bodies like ISO off necessary funding is a dangerous oversight.
Poor funding is partly to blame for the loopholes inside Uganda’s intelligence system, which critics have long said that in the wake of terror attacks in the region, is a big cause for worry.
Some critics say failure to fund the intelligence bodies and professionalise them is deliberate because the executive only sees them as necessary to serve its interests at the expense of national security.
Yet critics warn that as Uganda’s intelligence remains riddled with weaknesses, unreformed and unequipped, what attacks like the September 2001 on the U.S, the July 2010 and the Westgate attack have shown that critical reforms in intelligence are critical if a country is to fight terrorism.
Seemingly cognizant of the problem, in 2012, President Yoweri Museveni directed an overhaul of the country’s top intelligence bodies.
WoW….. wow….. – the level of incompetence exhibited by this government is astounding…. – It will take a huge effort to extricate Uganda from the mess it is in, after Museveni is gone.
There is order in chaos. Order may not necessarily manifest as organization, at least not in the business of national security. Intelligence organs are set up to function amidst and against chaos. There can therefore not be an organized way to operate in chaos.
These bodies seem to serve their purpose. The challenge they face is post-regime career aspirations. Loyalties seem to individuals rather than to the state. The persons that made careers out of building our intelligence organizations have either fallen out with the regime or are themselves targets of espionage. It would be self-defeating to therefore continue relying on the apparatus they set up. Gen Sejusa, Gen Tumukunde, JPAM, etc have at one time or the other been on the wrong side of the state or perceived as enemies of state. Per their background, its only casual to assume they still rely on the same apparatus for their overt or covert activities.
Obviously, the two organizations that are growing and supplementing each other are Police and SFC. I would like to believe that SFC shoulders a massive responsibility on military, domestic and international intelligence. It is not without reason that they have grown into an autonomous arm within the armed forces, to the point they are perceived to handle the most sensitive aspects of the armed forces.
Thanks to overt political actors like Dr Besigye and official opposition political parties, domestic threats have taken on a predictive pattern and are thus containable. Domestic threats are largely political in nature and designed around publicly pronounced objectives of dismantling the regime. Their methodologies have also been announced as defiance and political participation in elections. It has thus been possible to contain them with actions of Police. In fact, one could say they are largely responsible for the growth of mandate of police. The only regrettable occurrence arising out of this arrangement is that regime politicians have not risen to the task of thwarting political threats. However, both the guerilla nature of the regime and its core opponents perhaps generate locus for dimensions of subversion that necessitate a militant police with core intelligence capabilities.
It is the covert political actors that cause anxiety because resources, focus and personnel have been diverted to overt political actors. The unexplained assassinations in the city and country against both religious and political targets would only justify anxiety if we forgot that there is order in chaos and that this chaos could be a mere manifestation of threat elimination. Without insinuation, though desirous of avoiding the assumption that there is an unseen gap in intelligence, it would be my calculated guess that replacing the likes of ISO with the likes of SFC also comes at a cost in methods of operation. The former may have been trained in tracking and apprehension for justice while the latter might have been trained for justice by radical displacement; hence the seeming chaos / body count. It would be acceptable to classify this as subjective conjecture!
These traditional intelligence bodies have simply been starved of access for the simple reason that counter-intelligence may have reached the conclusion that they either gather intelligence and disseminate to otherwise non-designated persons, or could be used to funnel disinformation to those prior in their command but now classified as threats to the hold of power, yet still relying on the traditional intelligence bodies for information. Starving them of access is to thus deny opponents access, while not disbanding them is to maintain a monitoring capability over their personnel in as far as collusion with opponents. If they were totally not required, as with defunct SIB which was said to be disseminating to non-designated persons, they would have likewise been disbanded.
A regime that has survived for 30 years has not done so against the backdrop of disorganization but rather flexible interlopes among its strengths and radical displacement of its weaknesses. Perhaps those that yearn for functionality of traditional bodies are those most starved of access from the services they provided – now inaccessible from the new bases of Police and SFC whose loyalty may be the last in question. For opponents and anti-regime protagonists, a blunder would be to assume that the chaos denotes disorganization and loss of control. Such a blunder in psycho-analysis is probably what causes fatal mistakes that lead to the kind of radical displacement that gives rise to the chaos / body count.
This is the advantage or disadvantage of the overt political players as they normalise chaos to appear as political drama, and this then allows aggravated levels of chaos to go unchecked – this unchecked chaos can be seen in the political drama that flourishes alongside terrifying chaos that manifests either as gun violence and assassinations, or national tragedies arising out of conflict with the regime; with high death tolls. Whether they are then part of the superstructure or mere *useful idiots* (Russian analogy for gullible unwitting simple players in a larger sophisticated game), or whether it serves their purpose of retaining visibility and thus relevance to the current and future political dispensation, are all subjective!
What is sure is that the lakuna in the traditional bodies now starved of access has only been contained by continually engaging the threats in their own land. Keeping the radical extremists busy in the likes of Somalia, Sudan and CAR has created ample capacity for the likes of SFC to keep track of both local collaborators and those that move within borders to strike at the homeland. There would be no need of ESO per-say in the absence of a volatile diaspora group presenting a threat to the hold of power. The diaspora is either emotionally drawn to the overt political drama actors or filled with *reserve commanders* who appear to have fallen out with the regime and thus act as magnates for the radical types; for whom monitoring becomes easy. Whether the reserve commanders are also part of the superstructure or *useful idiots* is also subjective. A third alternative of *passive actors* may also apply to them but would not call for expansion of the likes of ESO.
The threat to the regime both domestic and globally appears narrowed against the office of the President and the survival of the regime; all political in nature. It is covert players that run and operate in shadows for whom no outfit can account for their containment. A calculated guess would be that they lay in wait for post-regime action or are actively engaged in laying the ground for post-regime scenarios. What is true is that the order in chaos has been held together by the person and office of the founder. In absence of one and the same, only disorganization of biblical proportions will welcome any dawn. It is for that that we the grass cannot afford prayers of comfort or expectations of relief. It will be much worse before it gets any better for our lot; at which point, worse, like chaos, be have been normalized too.
That fellow countrymen, is the world of foolery – one in which the wise like to act foolish. Remember that fools cannot engage in foolery for they lack both the wit and sadism to master foolery. Foolery is an art and science for the deviously wise!