Musaazi Namiti
Ugandans have lived with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government for nearly 40 years and are used to its catalogue of glaring failings, chief among which is its inability to hold those in public offices accountable and to rein in runaway corruption. But now they have a new problem to contend with: learning to live with a central bank that is beginning to look very much like the government in power.
The latest scandal to hit the Bank of Uganda (BoU) — offshore hacking that led to the theft of Shs60b — has shocked many Ugandans. Although some of the money has allegedly been recovered, this newspaper, citing reliable sources, reported on November 28 that insiders in BoU had played some role in the theft. This simply means some of the bank’s employees are thieves.
Ugandans are asking how the bank, whose principal objective of financial regulation is to maintain stability and soundness of the banking system, can perform the task effectively when it has large skeletons in its closet. Perhaps the scandal would not be shocking if it was the first. But BoU is no stranger to scandals. In fact, it is as scandal-ridden as the NRM government.
And just like NRM officials who muck up things and do not even get a slap on the wrist, BoU officials rarely get punished in the real sense.
Here is a snapshot of the bank’s failings over the years.In 2018, BoU top officials, including the late Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, who was at the time the governor, appeared before a parliamentary committee over their role in the irregular closure and sale of seven commercial banks between 1993 and 2017.
The committee found that BoU had mismanaged the sale of the banks and that — bizarrely — it appointed auditors after distressed banks, whose management it had assumed, had been sold.
Months after the report came out, BoU was dominating the headlines in April 2019 over a scandal that involved a suspicious consignment on a chartered flight from France that had delivered banknotes. Mutebile was forced to issue a statement, saying during the verification process, BoU staff reported an anomaly in the inventory of the expected consignment and that he had “requested the Anti-Corruption Unit of the State House to investigate the matter”.
Lt Col Edith Nakalema, who headed the unit, said BoU had received the 20 pallets it was expecting but there were five extra pallets on board. Up to now, it is not clear whether the scandal was thoroughly investigated and who was behind the illegal consignment.
As the media reported the latest scandal, Ugandans were also treated to news of counterfeit banknotes of Shs50,000 denomination worth Shs500m in PostBank’s Mbale branch.
BoU runs a currency centre in Mbale, one of the 10 centres it manages across the country. It is responsible for printing the currency and is supposed to ensure banknotes in circulation are genuine. But it has not said a thing about the counterfeit banknotes — at least not on its social media platforms. For the hacking scandal, BoU took days to issue a statement, and it deliberately downplayed the scandal, calling it a “payment incident”.
There are trust issues, and the bank seems to have a public image problem. It is no longer debatable that some of its employees are dreadful crooks. In 2023, this newspaper reported that BoU had sued staff who had changed their dates of birth to delay retirement.Reading stories about BoU sometimes feels like reading about the NRM. For the NRM it is too late to fix the mess; for BoU, it is not.
The writer, Musaazi Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
