IGG infiltrated by wrong elements - Museveni

KAMPALA. President Museveni has said the Inspectorate of Government (IG) has been infiltrated by wrong elements who have made it difficult to wipe corruption out of Uganda.
The President said as a result, he has created other units based in State House to help fight the vice.

Mr Museveni said this yesterday while opening the 9th Commonwealth regional conference of heads of anti-corruption agencies in Africa at Lake Victoria Serena Golf Resort and Spa in Kigo, Wakiso District.

The five-day conference attracting heads of anti-corruption agencies from 16 African states under the Commonwealth is hosted by the IGG, Justice Irene Mulyagonja.

Mr Museveni said much as he considers integrity when appointing the IGG, the bureaucracy followed by the agency in recruiting staff has exposed the Inspectorate to infiltration by wrong elements.
“For IGG and Uganda Revenue Authority, the starting point was integrity hunting but soon after, I think they started becoming bureaucratic. They now start advertising looking for the ones who qualified well. So I don’t know what happened there,” he said.

“I no longer hear the fire. How do I know that the fire is no longer going out? My resistance councils, my villagers. I hear the villagers crying ‘things are going wrong’. But if they are going wrong, what happened to the watchman, the one I left at home? Why hasn’t he heard that somebody is breaking the window? I think let me put a watchman to watch the watchman. So, I have now had to create three additional watchmen,” he added.

The President told the delegates at the conference being attended by the Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Ms Patricia Scotland, that he created the State House Health Monitoring Unit, the State House Engineering Unit and the Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) to watch over the anti-corruption agencies. Mr Museveni said by appointing such units in the Office of the President, the anti-corruption agencies are being strengthened because they now have other officers to watch over them.

“When I appointed this state house unit; the new one [ACU], it was not to replace the IGG. No! It is to help her because I think she was infiltrated slowly by slowly by some groups. We don’t know how they come. I went back to look for watchmen to watch the watchmen.

That is how I got the young lady (Lt Col Edith Nakalema), she is an army officer and she is trying to form her group,” the President said.

He urged the Commonwealth Secretariat to help strengthen their anti-corruption agencies through supporting the effective investigations, prosecution and coordination to stop the vice. Ms Scotland said corruption is a threat to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“A house cannot be built on a rotten foundation. Eliminating corruption brings multiple benefits. Corruption acts as tax on investment. Fighting corruption has to be a priority for our member states,” she said.

Justice Mulyagonja, who was praised by Ms Scotland as a pearl of anti-corruption agencies, said her office has started working with ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to manage internal processes of detecting and preventing corruption.
She said if the MDAs manage to prevent corruption internally, the Inspectorate will then focus its efforts on the “more complex” forms of corruption.

Anti-graft units
Some of the anti-corruption agencies created by law in Uganda are the IGG, the Directorate of Public Prosecution, Office of the Auditor General, and the police’s Criminal Investigations and Crime Intelligence Directorate.

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