UAP case: Declared dead general manger speaks out

Kampala. The man who was reported dead in an accident on Mityana-Mubende road and is at the centre of an ongoing court case in which his former employer sued an insurance company for failing to pay compensation, has spoken to Saturday Monitor.
Mr Brown Mwebembezi, 39, stands about six feet off the ground, appears healthy and strong, and says he was hardly sickly during the three years when he was supposed to be dead. During those three years, Mr Mwebembezi says he struggled to provide for his family which, during that period, expanded by another member – now a one year and four months old toddler.
He has five children, three boys and two girls, and one wife, who he provides for by dealing in printing and fabrication.
It was still in the business of printing and fabrication, Mr Mwebembezi says, where he met with Mr John Barisigara, a business partner who he says would eventually “declare me dead behind my back.”
His huge eyes well up with tears and at intervals appear like they will pop out as Mr Mwebembezi talks to us. At other times, Mr Mwebembezi tries to smile, but you can easily tell that the smile is forced.
“My family and friends have suffered a lot of anguish (when they heard that there was a court case trying to force an insurance company to compensate for my death),” Mr Mwebembezi says.
Mr Barisigara, the man Mr Mwebembezi accuses of “manufacturing my death to make money”, did not speak to us for this article.
After a number of calls to his known phone number went unanswered on Wednesday, we sent him the following text message: “Good morning Mr Barisigara. Eriasa Mukiibi here, I am a journalist at Monitor. I have spoken with Mr Brown Mwebembezi who has made what I consider serious allegations about you. I am writing a story for tomorrow in which some of these allegations will be carried. The story is about the compensation case involving UAP Insurance. It is therefore my wish to speak to you about it. I hope this can happen before 2 pm to enable me complete the story.”
Mr Barisigara did not respond to the text message and switched off his phone shortly afterwards. The phone did not go back on by the time we went to press.

How it started
Mr Mwebembezi says he met Mr Barisigara about four or five years ago and asked him to enter into a partnership. Mr Barisigara had a registered company called Gaguba Uganda Limited, through which Mr Mwebembezi wished to seek printing contracts.
According Mr Mwebembezi, they agreed that he would look for jobs in printing and fabrication, which Mr Barisigara would finance. In the end, the profits would be shared, with Mr Mwebembezi taking 25 per cent and Mr Barisigara, being the owner of the capital, taking 75 per cent of the profits. To all intents and purposes, therefore, Mr Mwebembezi was a commission agent.
But Mr Mwebembezi would soon be made to sign a document that “appointed” him general manager of the company, Gaguba Uganda Limited.
“John told me to sign the document that it would help us in proving that the company was well streamlined,” Mr Mwebembezi says. “I signed it without paying much attention.”

Mr Mwebembezi says Mr Barisigara’s company existed more on paper than in reality, to the extent that it was Mr Mwebembezi himself who opened its first email account. But the email account would soon be monopolised by Mr Barisigara, Mr Mwebembezi says, and the password to the email was changed. He says Mr Barisigara told him the email address would be exclusive for a while because “there was important business information for which it will be used.”
Relations between the duo had begun souring as Mr Mwebembezi had his suspicions. One day, when Mr Barisigara was out of office, Mr Mwebembezi says he got into the office, onto Mr Barisigara’s computer, and checked the company email. He says he found the computer in “sleep” mode but the screen came to life immediately he tapped on the keyboard.
His suspicions were confirmed.
“I read an email referring to the ‘untimely death of Brown Mwebembezi’,” Mr Mwebembezi says, “I froze for a moment.”
He says he forwarded the email to his account and exited the office.

“I told his relative (about the email announcing his death) and he arranged a meeting between us in John’s office,” Mr Mwebembezi says. He refuses to name Mr Barisigara’s relative whom he says he informed about the matter, observing that the other person is innocent and should not be dragged into the controversy.
The meeting, Mr Mwebembezi says, took place in Mr Barisigara’s office at the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives at Farmers House, where he worked as Senior Information Scientist.
At the meeting, Mr Mwebembezi says, Mr Barisigara asked him: “Where would I get the money to finance the work that we do?”
It is money that had drawn Mr Mwebembezi to Mr Barisigara in the first place, but Mr Mwebembezi, it seems, did not want the money so much to the extent of allowing his business partner to declare him dead.

“That was the end between us,” Mr Mwebembezi says. From 2014 until recently when investigators acting on behalf of UAP Insurance company went looking for him, Mr Mwebembezi says he would only see his former business colleague at a distance.
But, as we now know, what seemed to Mr Mwebembezi to be the end was actually the beginning of something different.
Mr Mwebembezi now knows that Mr Barisigara had aggressively pursued UAP Insurance for compensation over Mr Mwebembezi’s supposed death.
A well-knit plan would have been executed to perfection had it not been for UAP’s refusal to ‘compensate’ Gaguba Uganda Ltd and Mr Mwebembezi’s ‘family’, leading to a suit in the Commercial Division of the High Court during which the bubble burst.

According to Mr Barisigara’s company’s plaint lodged in the Commercial Court, Mr Mwebembezi, who was then employed as the general manager of Gaguba Uganda Ltd, was on or about July 12, 2013, involved in a fatal accident in Mubende “during the course of employment.”
In the course of the accident, Gaguba Uganda Ltd’s plaint shows that the ‘deceased’, Mr Mwebembezi, had on him Shs19,800,000 belonging to the company, which was also lost. The plaint further shows that Gaguba Uganda Ltd had taken out “both workers’ compensation and money insurance policies” with UAP covering both the company’s workers and money losses.
According to the plaint, Gaguba Uganda Ltd had “received from the Kampala Capital City Authority Labour Office an assessment of the compensation due to the deceased’s next of kin and a demand for payment of the same.”

Basing on this, Mr Barisigara’s Gaguba Uganda Ltd, through court, sought recovery of Shs310.5m as compensation claim under UAP Insurance’s policy that the company had taken out for its supposedly deceased employee, Mr Mwebembezi. In addition to this, the company wanted “damages for breach of contract” and “interest and costs”.
Explaining its grievances to the court, Mr Barisigara’s company wrote in its plaint: “the defendant (UAP) indicated that it would carry out its own investigations of the matter before honouring the claim. To this end, the defendant requested for and received from the plaintiff a number of documents, met the plaintiff’s administrators on a number of occasions with queries which were all answered but the defendant still never honoured the claim.”

Mwebembezi “resurrects”

It is not clear how UAP Insurance cracked this neatly worked out plot and eventually proved that Mr Mwebembezi was actually alive. But, going by UAP’s written statement of defence deposited in court on August 27, 2014, the argument was not at all about whether Mr Mwebembezi was dead or alive.
Take this paragraph in UAP’s defence, for example: “Following a fatal accident involving the plaintiff’s (Gaguba Uganda Ltd) employee (Mwebembezi Brown), the plaintiff agreed to the assessment of the District Labour Officer (at KCCA) in respect of the compensation payable to the representatives of the deceased.”

In the paragraph that follows, UAP argued that Gaguba Uganda Ltd, under the law, had no right to admit any liability and offer or promise any payment for Mr Mwebembezi’s “death” without first seeking the consent of UAP.
Elsewhere, UAP, through its lawyers Sebalu and Lule Advocates, argued that Gaguba Uganda Ltd had at no point, not even at the police, reported the loss of the Shs19,800,000 that it claimed got lost.

UAP showed in its statement of defence that it would seek to prove that at the time of Mr Mwebembezi’s supposed accident and death, he was not on duty. Their defence claimed that one Didas Byamukama “who is supposed to be the maize dealer the deceased had gone to meet (in Mubende) is actually the employee of the plaintiff and was within the vicinity of his work place at the time of the accident.”
The insurance company must have come upon information that Mr Mwebembezi was in fact still alive in the course of its investigations. And what a discovery it was!
Mr Mwebembezi’s mother, in Muhanga, Kabale District, one day received strange visitors form Kampala. They told her they needed information about her son, Mr Mwebembezi, so that should her son pass away, his estate would pass to the rightful beneficiaries.

Not knowing what to do, Mr Mwebembezi says, his mother called him on phone. He was in Kampala. In the phone conversation, Mr Mwebembezi says, he quizzed his mother’s visitors about their mission before accepting to meet with them in Kampala.
But before leaving his mother’s home, Mr Mwebembezi said, the “visitors” extracted a lot of information about him, which he would learn about in a follow-up phone call to his mother later in the day.
“I got anxious and called those people again demanding to know why they had asked for all that private information about me,” Mr Mwebembezi says. “We agreed to meet in Kampala the following day.

When the phone call came the following day, September 28, 2016, Mr Mwebembezi was ready to jump. He agreed to meet with the caller at Acacia Mall in Kamwokya.
“I was in Industrial Area but I immediately jumped on a bodaboda and got to Acacia Mall,” Mr Mwebembezi says. “I had been disturbed all night about what was going on.”
After locating the person who wanted to talk to him, Mr Mwebembezi says, it took him just about two minutes for his host, who had then been joined by two others, to demand that they go over to Kira Road police station. He was told he would find out from the police station what the matter was.
At the police station, Mr Mwebembezi says, he was not treated as a suspect, but he was informed that his cooperation was needed to prove that he was alive. He was told the full story.

“All of it came back to me,” Mr Mwebembezi says. He could then make sense of his “innocent” actions in the past, including signing an ‘appointment letter’ when he was not actually in regular employment and, above all, the email that referred to his ‘death’.
When Mr Mwebembezi eventually appeared before Justice David Wangutusi of the Commercial Court, he was informed that he would be a witness in the case, much to his relief.
“I was then told that my wife and my children had been coming to court to testify about my death and demanding compensation,” Mr Mwebembezi says, “I don’t know any of those people and my real wife has never gone to that court. The case is still pending disposal.

The background

In 2013, Gaguba Uganda Limited acquired insurance for its workers.
In July 2013, the company reported that one of its employees, a one Brown Mwebembezi, had died in a fatal accident on Mityana- Mubende road during the course of his employment as his employer’s general manager. And that Shs19.8million was lost.
Gaguba Uganda Ltd acquired an assessment of compensation from the Kampala Labour Office and presented it to the UAP insurance to demand for payment. The payment was to be paid to the alleged deceased’s next of kin.

UAP Insurance does not deny holding insurance policies with Gaguba Uganda Ltd but had opted for an independent investigation into the matter before honouring the claim.
Through its lawyers, Gaguba Uganda Ltd sued UAP Insurance Uganda Limited claiming to recover more than Shs310 million as compensation and damages for breach of contract.
In June 2014, court ordered UAP Insurance to pay Shs310,500,000 with interest of 28 per cent per year to Gaguba Uganda Limited. UAP applied to the judge and the order was set aside. Upon hearing of the case, UAP commissioned an investigation which revealed that Mr Mwebembezi, who was reported dead, is alive.
A criminal case was registered at Kira Road police pending investigations.
The report was filed before the Commercial Court where the case now awaits determination before Justice David Wangutusi.

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