This sounds strange and embarrassing

This sounds strange and embarrassing but these things happen. Grapevine has heard that on some of the foreign trips President Yoweri Museveni has made to certain European countries, the Presidential Gulfstream jet is sprayed with some substance by the host nation's airport authorities.

If true, this suspected fear for malaria and other tropical maladies in Europe and other Western countries seems to be taken as such a rather serious matter if they must subject visiting dignitaries to what might amount to an indignity of 'fumigation'.
Recently when the President visited Australia, his aides were embarrassed when the airport authorities embarked on spraying the plane even before President Museveni disembarked.

In New Zealand, Grapevine has learnt that the authorities went even further and searched the President's entourage. In fact when the President was leaving New Zealand, the authorities are said to have quietly carried out a head count, possibly to be sure that none of the President's men and women remained behind.
May be this is the kind of treatment that makes Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe have such a rabid attitude towards these nations.

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More cash for Bassajja?
The controversy surrounding the sale of Nakasero Market is still continuing.
It would appear some senior people in the NRM organisation, in which city tycoon Hassan Bassajjabalaba is head of the Entrepreneurs League on the party's National Executive Committee (NEC), have started lobbying that he gets a refund and compensation for unspecified sums of money he could have invested in the market purchase.

They also want Bassajja compensated for damages before he can pull out of the venture and let the vendors take over as per the wishes of the President. Bassajja has vowed that he will not lose the billions he sank into the venture even though the President has sided with the vendors. You may want to recall that Bassajja has in the past benefited from the State's benevolence in excess of Shs21 billion.

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Pastor on the precipice
The rate at which Pastors are involved in scandals and in fighting is alarming.
The latest in these most troubling and unGodly occurrences involves a hot exchange and battle of words between a fairly well-known pastor with a church located north of Kampala and a lady with a Muslim-sounding name.

The lady who is a former member and elder at The Synagogue has of late been on a number of Local FM stations threatening to reveal the dirt she claims to know surrounding the pastor's church and his operations. She has given the pastor an ultimatum in which he should either apologise to her for the alleged mistreatment and humiliation she suffered while at his church or she would propose to make public the unsavoury details of the said pastor's alleged dirty ways.

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Job for sale in the police?
A number of candidates who applied for jobs as police cadets are cursing the level of corruption in this country.
Grapevine has been told by hurt, frustrated and disconsolate prospective applicants that the jobs were for sale; and that those who had no money or proper connections never made it. It is not exactly clear who was being paid to hand out the jobs, though. Worse still, every candidate was seriously scrutinised just to be sure that those who do not support the NRM were not recruited.

In fact internal security and military intelligence were specifically drafted in to conduct background research on the candidates. Persons with even a slightest of opposition leaning tendencies, even mere suspicions of that possibility lost the opportunity to serve and to protect.

At the village level, Grapevine has learnt that the GISOs (Gombolola Internal Security Officers) were in charge of screening the applicants. Tells you something about the prosperity-for-all slogan and other such sounding nationalist policy pronouncements, doesn't it?

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Garang 'rests in peace'
Whispers in the corridors of power have it that the government has most probably given up on its own much-touted investigations into the cause of the July 2005 helicopter crash, which led to the death of Dr John Garanga, former leader of Sudanese People's Liberation Army/Movement.

Sources say that since the death of Brig. Noble Mayombo, who was investigating the matter, no other officer has so far been substantively assigned by the government to continue from where the late Mayombo had left off, if at all.
But there are also other reports that government may have been satisfied with the earlier joint experts' report which concluded that the helicopter indeed crashed.

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Buganda land racket unveiled
This might come as sad news to the people who have been behind the racket to rip off Kabaka's of Buganda of assorted properties, including land.
We have got it on a high authority that the racket, involving some local council officials and some known tycoons in the city thought they could quietly continue selling off kingdom land to unsuspecting members of the public. The racket, however, has been exposed in the ongoing exercise of registration of all the tenants on Kabaka's land in order to qualify them as legitimate tenants by issuing them with certificates of occupancy.

Mengo leaders had tasked KK Land and Property Management Company limited during the reign of the then famous Buganda Katikkiro Daniel Muliika to do the investigation. When the situation permits, soon, we shall give you the names of the landgrabbers.

Cadres at White Hall
If you are a politician, previously holding the title of Member of Parliament, but was unfortunate in the last poll, despair no more - especially if you have sympathies for the ruling party.

A new list for RDCs and possible appointees in the public service is being drafted by the powers that be. And so if you were in the 7th Parliament and voted aye for the lifting of presidential term limits, you could soon be the proud holder of an office in the local government area, even at Kampala City Council, giving "technical advice".

It is reported that the President will be receiving all sorts of recommendations from the Public Service Commission in light of the damaging revelations about certain employees at White Hall that have come to light during investigations carried out by the Parliamentary Local Government Committee.

Officials with questionable record and who were once interdicted by former Town Clerk Gordon Mwesigye but are still serving may be among those who will be making way for the NRM cadres. If it comes to pass this will be the first fulfilment of the recent Kyankwanzi resolution to stuff the civil service with cadres.