By Mulengera Reporters
As the line minister for sports, Peter Ogwang arguably suffered the wrath of Anita Among’s power more than anyone else. His docket requires him to be the political supervisor of all sporting activities including football, which is controlled by FUFA whose very belligerent President is Eng. Moses Magogo, the very aggressive husband to Anita Among.
Because he was sleeping with such a powerful person, Magogo grew wings to the extent of thinking he could disregard the Ministry of Education & Sport, and keep getting away with it. This recently was on clear display when FUFA CEO Edgar Watson was aided to sneak into a Committee of Parliament and deal with the legislature directly regarding the Shs75bn supplementary funding allocation for the Federation, without coming through Peter Ogwang who all along had been the MoES contact person to interface with MPs on behalf of the entire sector, if not JC Muyingo.
In fact, the very proud legislator from Budiope considered always himself to be the defacto Minister of Sports. He would disregard and skip attending the sports sub sector meetings Ogwang would convene out of necessity.
Ogwang saw this as unacceptable insubordination and repeatedly pushed back. He was vigorous and made it clear he wouldn’t relent and accept to be under Magogo’s armpits.
When it came to time to reconstruct Namboole national stadium, a multi-billion deal meant to ready it for AFCON, Gen Museveni insisted the lucrative job had to be given to the UPDF’s economic arm called National Enterprise Corporation (NEC) yet Magogo felt betrayed when Ogwang supported that arrangement.
Magogo wanted the thing to be handled by FUFA and counted on his then very powerful wife Anita Among. At minimum, he wanted his FUFA to be appointed to serve as the technical supervisors of the Namboole works or someone nominated by them.
Ogwang warned of dire consequences if FUFA officials didn’t stop using Parliament as a platform to demonize NEC/UPDF soldiers while portraying them as not doing a good job. Magogo was warned to tread carefully but he didn’t heed.
He continued using plenary sessions of Parliament to contradict Ogwang while exposing the alleged ineptness of UPDF soldiers on the Namboole project into which the GoU sunk over Shs300bn. Ogwang’s superiors at the education ministry, including Minister Janet Museveni, took note of this belligerence though didn’t immediately push back.
Magogo, who once in a time would get Anita Among to pressurize and rebuke Ogwang, didn’t stop there.
He went on to behave very aggressively towards the leadership at the education ministry regarding each and every AFCON-related infrastructure project.
The Hoima stadium project stood out more than any other. He was also antagonistic towards Janet’s Ministry regarding the AFCON training facilities such as the ones at Makerere and Kyambogo Universities.
At some point, several traditional public secondary schools’ playgrounds had been included for training facilities but were later on dropped after Janet felt there was no time and working on all of them would make the 2027 AFCON seem costly and too expensive for no good reason.
Magogo, who was under pressure from construction industry friends who wanted deals and a pie off the AFCON deals, was unhappy with this and furiously protested to the top leadership at the Ministry while criticizing the decision to omit many of the training facilities which had originally been listed.
There are lots of correspondences between him as FUFA President and Janet Museveni as the line Minister. In many of these, whose contents we shall be reviewing in our subsequent coverage, Magogo would use strong insultive language and often came up as bossy and disrespectful towards Janet Museveni and her PS Dr. Kedrace Turyagyenda.
The biggest fall out was on the Hoima stadium whose construction the President assigned to Turkish company Summa International Construction company. The project is worth hundreds of billions. As was the case with Namboole, Magogo still wanted FUFA to be in the driver’s seat.
When the project was kept in the Ministry of Education, Magogo and other FUFA bosses were unhappy and tried to antagonize Janet and Dr. Kedrace Turyagyenda who were emboldening Ogwang to fearlessly stand up to the Ugandan footballing mafia whose members counted on the backing of Anita Among who as of that time, was still very powerful and had unlimited access to the President.
Actors in the Magogo FUFA universe didn’t totally relent even after the H.E had given Hoima to the Turkish firm under pre-financing arrangements. They demanded to recommend smaller Ugandan companies to serve as sub-contractors and suppliers of things like sand, stones, steal and cement etc under the local content/BuBu arrangement.
This too didn’t succeed as the contractor had already got his own sub-contractors. Magogo leveraged on the Among good will and got a meeting with the President at Entebbe State House. His wife tagged along and, to their shock, Gen Museveni insisted that Janet attends that same since she directly supervises Ogwang.
The duo was shocked to realize the President wasn’t prepared to lock Janet out of the meeting since the alleged Ogwang-instigated fraud on the Hoima stadium project, which they wanted to detail to him about, falls under her Ministry.
The powerful couple came to that mid-morning meeting with what they claimed was their evidence implicating Peter Ogwang in shady dealings on the Hoima project. It was claimed that the Ngariam MP even had some of his own proxy companies serving as sub-contractors on the Hoima project. The duo stood their ground insisting their claims against Ogwang were true, totally disregarding clarifications Janet kept making in defense of her blue-eyed boy Ogwang, during that same meeting.
Museveni concluded the mid-morning meeting by sarcastically thanking the duo for their whistle blowing and saw them off. Weeks later, after completing his verification which totally exonerated Ogwang, Museveni convened another follow up meeting and summoned the duo. Unknown to them, Ogwang was also present at that subsequent meeting. Janet was there too.
On arrival, the big man from Rwakitura asked the duo to restate their case, repeating what they had been reporting to him about Ogwang so that he is able to defend himself. They nervously did as Ogwang and Janet pensively looked at them lie through their teeth. When they were done, Museveni who had already counter investigated and realized these were mere fabrications, asked Ogwang to defend himself.
Eloquent as always, Ogwang dispelled everything and made the duo laugh at themselves. Before he could even finish responding to each and every allegation, Gen Museveni stopped him saying he had verified and knew the truth already.
He told off the duo making it clear they were hurting because powerful Janet’s personal involvement had made it hard for them and for their proxies to cash in on the millions of dollars they had targeted to make off AFCON-related preparations.
Ogwang once again emerged triumphant and after the meeting, he quarreled with the two as they moved to their respective vehicles and assured Anita Among that none of her malicious weapons against him would ever succeed. Magogo, who was so angry and deflated, never spoke to Ogwang after that meeting.
Months later, a delegation of purported NRM cadres from the construction industry where they thrive as brokers, was sneaked into State House ostensibly to implicate Ogwang. Some of the delegation members defended/praised Magogo while demonizing and telling lies against Peter Ogwang. Some went as far as deceptively claiming to be extortion victims by Peter Ogwang.
They implored the President to fire him and make David Kabanda, who as of that time was a very close ally of Among, the Minister of Sports on grounds that he would work well with FUFA, which it was claimed doesn’t need an antagonistic Minister as the country counts down to AFCON 2027. Gen Museveni once again verified and established these were the duo’s proxies who had been aided to go meet him at State House to tell him deliberate lies.
Days later, Museveni, who had already bought into Janet’s explanations corroborating Peter Ogwang’s innocence and incorruptibility, rang the Sports Minister requiring him to come to Entebbe State House for an AFCON-related session.
This time round, the Among/Magogo duo wasn’t invited. Museveni assured Ogwang he had verified everything and concluded that the Magogo duo was fighting him merely because he was as clean as a white man regarding AFCON preparation deals. Ogwang was informed about the pressure Gen Museveni was under to fire and replace him with someone else.
On his way out of State House, a tearful Ogwang (choking on anger and feeling betrayed) locked himself in his car and rang Anita Among and blasted her for pretending to be his friend while at the same time working towards his knifing from his cabinet position. Ogwang ranted for roughly 10 minutes and concluded with “of all people, it wouldn’t have been you my sister Anita doing such a thing to me.”
He wished her luck in all her political endeavors and immediately switched off his phone just as Anita Among was starting on her explanation trying to deny everything. From that day on, reports began to emerge to the effect that Ogwang and Anita Among had fallen out. Among tried to mend fences but Ogwang, who at some point even blocked her calls, made it clear he was done with her.
He made it clear he was going to remain cordial and civil towards her in her capacity as the Speaker of Parliament as opposed to coming out openly to antagonize her while publicizing their fall out.
In fearlessly standing up to Anita Among, who he personally didn’t fear that much having seen her vulnerable while grassing during her years in FDC before coming to the Movement, Ogwang was partly emboldened by Janet’s declaration to the appointing authority that she still needed him at education to keep steering the sports sub sector as the country counted down to AFCON 2027. To the detriment of the Magogo couple, it became increasingly clear that Ogwang would remain sports Minister for as long as Janet remained the overall Education sector Minister.
The First Lady had previously described Ogwang to the President as “this nice young man who is adaptable, hardworking, results-oriented and always prepared to get things done.” She was also appreciative of the fact that Peter Ogwang had effectively served as the shock absorber, taking in all the bullying tactics and demonization by people in the Magogo universe, on her behalf. Actors in the Magogo universe would go to Museveni blaming Peter Ogwang even over footballing decisions they clearly knew couldn’t be taken and proclaimed without the senior Minister’s no objection.
AFCON ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (LOC):
Then came the making up of the AFCON Local Organizing Committee (LoC) which is tasked with coordinating with CAF to ensure that the 2027 sporting events in Kampala go as smoothly as planned. When the budget was being drawn up, people in the Magogo universe kept complaining that Ogwang was misleading Janet by insisting on modest budgeting. They were also uncomfortable having the thick-skinned Dr. Kedrace Turyagyenda serve as the accounting officer for all the AFCON billions (as was decreed by the President), because they considered her hard and too close to Janet Museveni to be successfully manipulated or compromised on anything.
This dispute equally went as far as meeting with Museveni who sided with Ogwang’s frugality regarding the AFCON overall budget, having learnt from the Nakyobe-organized NAM meeting of January 2024 that staging such international events in Kampala was after all not as costly as extortionist government officials would make it seem.
People from the Magogo universe tried to get Ogwang to go convince Janet that there was need to revise the AFCON budget upwards and when he refused, resentment multiplied. It was the same Ogwang who had repeatedly tipped Janet and Yoweri Museveni on how rogue-minded government officials planned to inflate costs and make a killing off the AFCON preparation activities.
AFCON LOC is headquartered at its Secretariat in Kololo, near Lugogo bypass behind Shell/JAVA House. People in the Magogo universe very much wanted to exclude Janet and instead have the FUFA President serve as the overall LOC Chairman. Efforts were even undertaken to get the CAF President cajole Museveni to let the FUFA boss chair LOC on grounds that this was the ideal thing to do.
Museveni disregarded all this pressure/scheming and in a subsequent meeting quarreled while demanding to know who exactly was originating claims that AFCON 2027 was coming to be co-hosted by Uganda largely because of the personal friendship between the Magogo couple and the CAF President. The big man from Rwakitura was furious and construed this as part of the FUFA universe broader efforts to undermine the effective leadership his wife Janet Museveni was rendering to the broader education sector under which sports falls.
Ogwang, backed by incorruptible Education Ministry PS Dr. Canon Kedrace Turyagyenda, fearlessly rejected calls to have Magogo serve as LOC chairman. He vigorously pushed back against claims that Janet and Ogwang were already too busy to render effective leadership over LOC. That’s how Janet Museveni, who vowed to ensure no scandals ever crop up relating to the AFCON 2027 event, became the Chairperson LOC, deputized by Peter Ogwang himself.
This greatly hurt Magogo (who just became a LOC member), and by extension his squeeze Anita Among-and thereby making the relationship between Ogwang and the former Speaker to become even more complicated.
Magogo, whose aggressive and disrespectful character knowledgeable sources say greatly diminished Anita Among’s acceptability to people in the Janet Museveni universe, resorted to defiance tactics of seldom showing up at Kololo for AFCON preparations-related LOC meetings.
Yet for every AFCON-related frustration Moses Magogo encountered, the blame went to Peter Ogwang who the powerful couple felt wasn’t doing enough to persuade Janet into their direction. The duo’s gradually diminishing acceptability by key handlers in the Janet Museveni universe was fallaciously blamed on mischief and sabotage by the Sports Minister whose relation with the former Speaker gradually became irretrievably broken.
So, for those who got to know of this fall out months earlier, it wasn’t surprising seeing the Saturday enthusiasm with which Peter Ogwang embraced Jacob Oboth-Oboth who the mighty in the Museveni universe have endorsed and are fronting to become the next Speaker of Parliament, inheriting what Anita Among and Moses Magogo had grown to consider to be their personal inheritance.
The truth is that, even though he kept it civil as promised, the Ngariam County MP (Peter Ogwang) had long become sick and tired of the leadership of Anita Among at Parliament, whose conspicuous political downfall has continued to be celebrated by millions of online-based Ugandans for whom Gen MK has become an instant hero.
For instigating and leading the clamping of Anita Among’s wings, Gen MK’s political popularity has soared and is seemingly still growing with many young people (who all along had been indifferent towards him) cheerfully signing up to become his disciples and diehard enforcers as the Ugandan general populace counts down to the day he will be becoming their reform-minded President. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
