Late on the afternoon of Saturday, June 28, several clips of youth clad in yellow T-shirts bearing images of President Museveni running amuck on the streets of Kampala started going viral.
Ms Grace Akullo, the retired former Director of Criminal Investigations (CID) and Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIGP) was the highest profile victim of an orgy of violence that saw several women either assaulted or lose valuables including mobile phones.
For now it is difficult to establish who let the dogs out, but people believed to be close to the President have been trading blame. Ms Hadija Namyalo, the coordinator of the Office of the National Chairman of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, accuses the coordinators of the ghetto structures of having deployed the youth who turned rogue on that day.
“I, unlike others, cannot come out and say that those who turned up to escort the President were not known. They were clad in T-shirts with the words “visionary leader”. The ones who distributed those T-shirts are the people in the police who claim to be under State House,” she said. Ms Namyalo did not name names, but it was generally understood that she was alluding to the coordinators of the ghetto Sacco’s project which commenced in March 2022 with the guidance of Mr Museveni. The Project Coordinator of the Ghetto Project, Brig Christopher Ddamulira, who is also the director of Crime Intelligence at the Uganda Police Force declined to comment, but Mr Shafiq Kalyango, the chairperson of Ghetto Structures Uganda, denies that any of his members were involved. “Members of each of the 12 Saccos were mobilised to participate in escorting President Museveni to pick nomination forms. We all converged at Usafi Market from where we marched to Nakasero.
Each of the groups had a banner indicating which Sacco it belonged to. When I received information that some of our people were involved in acts of violence I went out and counted all our people and they were all present. They were all present when the function ended and they were returned to their divisions. The elements who attacked people could therefore not have been part of us,” Mr Kalyango said.
The biggest talking point has been the origin of the T-shirts, but Maj Kuteesa, the deputy coordinator of Ghetto Project, insists that anyone could have accessed the yellow T-shirts. “The NRM has never slapped a moratorium on the printing of some of its paraphernalia. Anyone can go into an apparels’ manufacturing unit and have yellow baseball caps or T-shirts in the name of the party. That means that even wrong elements can print and distribute them for purposes of infiltrating party functions,” Maj Kuteesa says.
Mr Kalyango weighs in, insisting that the T-shirts that were adorned by those who assaulted people and stole phones and other valuables were distributed by NRM officials who he did not name.
Mask off
The police has for more than 10 years starting with the rallies organised by the political pressure group, Activists for Change (A4C), early in 2012, barred the political opposition from holding processions and other events on either the street of Kampala or in close proximity to busy or densely populated areas. The narrative has always oscillated between the need to avert the possibility of the political opposition engaging in “acts of disorder, lawlessness and mayhem” and the need to protect the rights of those who do not wish to engage in acts of civil disobedience.
Mr Kituuma Rusoke, the spokesperson of the Uganda Police Force has in recent times been vehement in his defence of the police’s stand. “We recognise the people’s right to demonstrate and hold processions, but people should also understand that in the enjoyment of those rights they should never prejudice the rights and freedoms of other people and the public interest,” Mr Rusoke said in a previous interview.
The severity of the injuries suffered by those who were attacked on June 28 by the self-styled “bazukulu” (grandchildren) of the President remains unclear, but their actions served to pull the mask off and revealed that the police has been bamboozling the public and in the process obscuring the fact that “lawlessness and mayhem” are not the preserve of the Opposition. The narrative that violence is a monopoly of the Opposition should however have been debunked even before Ms Namyalo went on television to own up.
On September 8, 2023, Okira Ito, a national of Japan who was working as an infrastructure consultant with Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) was attacked by goons adorning yellow T-shirts associated with the ruling NRM. His attackers were part of hundreds who turned up at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds for celebrations to commemorate Mr Museveni’s 79th birthday. Ito’s mistake was to attempt to recover a bag that he had lost to his attackers. They in the process inflicted injuries that he never recovered from. The September 2023 festivities were ironically organised by Ms Namyalo.
Different actors
Prior to Ms Namayalo’s appearance on the said talk show, some of those who had been arrested and arraigned before both Buganda Road Chief Magistrate’s Court and the Law Development Centre Court and their relatives had pointed an accusing finger at unnamed NRM officials.
“The children are innocent. They were told that where the President is, there is money. They were given only Shs15,000 and Shs20,000 and the NRM T-shirts to follow the crowd. Now the same people who called them have vanished,” Ms Maria Nalwanga, a mother of one of the accused said.
Another claimed that “community leaders used the party name to recruit” the youth.
Now a look at the list of those who were taken to court to answer for the horrific scenes show they are residents of three district districts. Sunday Monitor has since established that five of them were from three different divisions of Kampala; three from three different sub-counties in Wakiso and; one from Nakasongola. This points to the possibility that they were recruited by NRM officials and supporters from different district structures, who ferried them into the city. That people are hired and ferried to Museveni’s rallies and functions is not new. Mr Kalyango’s assertion that it was NRM officials who distributed the T-shirts reinforces that argument.
Fault lines
Now the ghettos have always been fertile grounds for the recruitment of supporters and members for the political opposition. They are home to the many angry, frustrated and sometimes despondent youth found on the streets of Kampala during the day. It was, however, not until the emergence of the Mr Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine and the People Power Movement, which later morphed into the National Unity Platform (NUP), that the ruling NRM awoke to the need to neutralise the Opposition’s hold on the ghettos. Mr Kyagulanyi’s decision to refer to himself as “the ghetto president” had a lot to do with the NRM’s decision to come up with tailor-made programmes aimed at not only neutralising his influence there, but also win over the ghetto population.
Mr Museveni moved to take the fight for the ghetto’s support to the ghetto. On October 267, 2019, he appointed Mr Mark Bugembe, aka Bucha Man as his special envoy to the ghetto and charged him with the responsibility of turning his fortunes around. The fight for the vote and the soul of the ghetto was on. Mr Joel Ssenyonyi, the spokesperson of the People Power Movement, rightly predicted that Mr Museveni would not win the ghetto vote in 2021 because he had impoverished the ghetto over a long period of time. It would seem that the annihilation that Mr Museveni and the NRM suffered in the 2021 elections forced Mr Museveni back to the drawing board.
That culminated in the mobilisation of the youth there to form structures through which they could be funded to go into income generation activities. For Mr Museveni, it would help him empower the ghetto youth economically and win them over to the NRM. For the police it was one way of getting the unemployed criminal elements off the streets, hence the involvement of Brig Ddamulira’s Directorate of Criminal Intelligence. He has previously said that it has worked wonders.
“If you look at the police report that we issue every year, the last report clearly indicated that the crime level has gone down but also in political violence, these are the people that the politicians have always used to cause confusion in Kampala because they felt they didn’t have a stake in what’s happening in the country. All those crimes have reduced. Your Excellency, even recently during the planned march to Parliament, we didn’t register a singer ghetto youth getting involved in those things,” he told the President in 2023.
New dimension
However, if this was meant to be a fight between the NRM and the political opposition for the heart and vote of the ghetto, it seems to have taken an altogether different dimension. What the public has been accustomed to have fights between law enforcement and security agencies over the control of resources intended for the fight against terrorism. Those fights became pronounced in the second half of 1999 as the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) fought the Internal Security Organisation (ISO) on one hand and the Special Branch (SB) of the Police the other. The argument at the time was that ISO and SB did not have the capacity to combat terrorism in Kampala. At the time Kampala had been reeling from bomb blasts that had gone off in several suburbs of Kampala including Kabalaga, killing several people and injuring many more.
The SB had at the time been controlling the counter terrorism kitty. The cause of bad blood was that it would only hand a few morsels to CMI and ISO. A mid-June 1999 announcement on Radio Uganda indicated that the CMI was taking over the investigation of terrorism cases because “terrorist were using military tactics”.
With it came a decision by the government to hand the counter terrorism budget to CMI. Then again between 2016 and the first quarter of 2018, there was the simmering fight between the police and the CMI and the police and ISO on the other. The fights came to the fore in August 2017 when the three launched separate investigations into the killings of women in Entebbe and Nansana in Wakiso. That was followed by the October 2017 arrest of police officers who were believed to be protégés of the then Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura.
They appeared before the General Court Martial on charges including kidnap, extortion, orchestrating robberies and unlawful possession of military stores. That was followed by the arrest by CMI in January 2018 of Abdullah Kitatta, a civilian aide of the General and his brother Huzair Kiwalabye. Gen Kayihura pushed back declaring that the police would not be intimidated by the army. He also barred the Force from sharing information with CMI before accusing ISO of working with criminals who were on the police’s radar. The jostling sparked public fears that the fights would jeopardise national security.
On February 14, 2018 Mr Museveni moved to allay those fears, suggesting that it was a fight between Generals Kayihura and Tumukunde and not the institutions that they led. “They (Security agencies) are not the ones fighting but their heads and we shall not allow it,” he said while addressing the media at Kawumu demonstration farm in Luweero. He indeed did not let them. Very early in March 2018, Mr Museveni brought the curtain down on Gen Kale Kayihura’s 13-year tenure as Inspector General of Police (IGP) and Maj Gen Henry Tumukunde’s 20 months tenure as minister for Security.
Money question
There had been no known public fights between individuals and organisations involved in Mr Museveni’s antipoverty fights, but that was until Tuesday when Ms Namyalo questioned the operations of the ghetto Saccos structure and how the Shs1.2 billion that the President advanced to them has so far been used. “They people (people in the police who claim to be under State House) were given money to get the ghetto youth out of poverty. My question is, did those children get that money? If they got it, is it possible that they got it, but still kept on grabbing people’s property? Three, if it is true that these children actually got the money, what else are they looking for if they are well off?” Ms Namyalo asked.
Maj Kuteesa dismisses Ms Namyalo’s argument. He told Sunday Monitor that the Shs1.2 billion was advanced to the 12 ghetto Saccos in the Kampala Metropolitan Area. “Each of the Saccos got Shs100 million which was remitted directly to their bank accounts. Unlike what the case was in the past when people would lobby from the government for the ghetto youth, get resources, but never remit the same to the intended recipients, the ghetto youth were trained and helped to elect leaders at all levels. Each Sacco has leaders and it is the leadership together with the members who handle the money. The coordination team had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of those Saccos,” Maj Kuteesa said.
Ms Namyalo also alluded to the existence of a “cocoon of people who claim that they have the state power” which she says has been “convincing him (President) that they are doing the right thing and they show him that all is well” yet many ghetto youth still approach her for assistance, which means that all is not well. Many of them, she says, have not yet benefited from the President’s grant. Mr Kalyango concedes that many of the youth are yet to benefit from the Shs1.2 billion, but argues that it is because of the stringent rules and preconditions that have been set before one gets to access the funds. “Saccos are member managed, member financed and member owned. So the grant that Mzee brought was for members of the Saccos. Every ghetto youth who wishes to be a member is free to join the Saccos and become a part of the ghetto structures.
Those who benefit must first open up accounts with the Saccos and also in the bank because if you are to borrow, the money goes directly to the applicant’s bank account. No one receives cash,” Mr Kalyango says. He says that quite a number of people are yet to become members of the Saccos in each of the divisions, which could explain why there are complaints that some people have been left out. Ms Namyalo also questioned whether soldiers would be the best suited persons to manage anti poverty programmes tailored for ghetto youth. “You cannot get a soldier and give him to manage a person who is challenged. A person who is challenged needs to be studied and learnt. You sympathise with that person and just win that person back,” she said.
