Govt orders Tumwine to pay Shs1.6 billion

Parliament

Gen Elly Tumwine, an artist and a soldier, known to have fired the first bullet during the Bush War that brought President Museveni to power, has been ordered to pay Shs1.6 billion in rent arrears for his 200-month occupation and use of Nommo Gallery, a government facility under Ministry of Labour, Gender and Social Development.
The outspoken anti-corruption crusader, representing the army in Parliament, has occupied the government facility for 17 years without paying for rent. Gen Tumwine owns Creations Ltd, a private company that occupies Nommo Gallery.
The demand note to the General dated September 5 reads: “As you are aware, Creations Ltd occupies space at Nommo Gallery. Since the start of the occupancy (in 1997), you have made no rental payments.”
The UNCC board sat on September 3 and resolved that Gen Tumwine be billed for the space he is occupying effective January 1997 using the rate provided to the board by the Government Valuer.

Recommendation
The Government Valuer report recommended that Gen Tumwine be charged Shs50,000 per square meter, translating into a monthly cost of Shs8,100,500 per month. The net internal area is 162.02 square meters. But because the General has not been paying for the last 200 months, the Government Valuer put the total bill at Shs1,620,100,000.
Uganda National Cultural Centre (UNCC) officials told Daily Monitor on Tuesday that if Gen Tumwine fails to pay the Shs1.6b, they will convene another meeting to agree on other ways of recovering the public funds from him. However, in the event that the General fails to pay, given his profile, this episode is likely to dent his image in the fight against corruption that costs the country billions of shillings annually and even land him in jail.

When Daily Monitor broke the story in August last year, Parliament intervened to stop the fight between Mr Pius Bigirimana, the Permanent Secretary in the ministry of Gender. The Gender Committee met National Theatre officials and confirmed that Gen Tumwine was not paying for rent. The General, then, dismissed the story as a handwork of the “fertile-mind” of nosy journalists and sheer “imaginations, fictions, and speculations” of the newspaper.
This newspaper reported last year that Mr Bigirimana had constituted a taskforce to carry out stock taking of the ministry. When the ministry put pressure on National Theatre to explain why Creations Ltd was not paying rent, they demanded that Gen Tumwine pays Shs1.2 billion.
Efforts to speak to Gen Tumwine have proved futile as his known mobile numbers have been off since Tuesday, but when this matter first arose, he wrote to Daily Monitor saying: “There is no agreement for rent of even one shilling on record. There is no money in arrears to be paid. It is all baseless.”

In judging cases like this, Gen Tumwine said “what is important is motive,” adding that “there is continued partnership for promoting art and culture and protection of the assets for artists”.
He said Nommo Gallery is for artists and established to promote art and culture. Gen Tumwine also said he does not own or run the gallery and as the patron and a serious stakeholder, he has done a lot to protect and improve the place with the knowledge of all who cared and mattered, in accordance with objective XXVI of the Constitution of Uganda.
“Whoever is at the Nommo Gallery and National Theatre is benefitting from my initiatives to generate money, otherwise they would have closed. I created the crafts village, which was previously a bushy place. I started the parking lot, which had been stolen by some unscrupulous people in KCC,” Gen Tumwine said.
UNCC officials, however, told Daily Monitor that Gender minister Mary Karooro Okurut met Gen Tumwine over the matter and that the position of the board is that if he fails to pay, he will be forced out of Nommo Gallery and dragged to court for failure to pay public funds.

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