HOW UGANDANS HAVE TRIVIALIZED NAKALEMA’S CORRUPTION WORK

By Our Reporters

After the President’s public address on Monday at Kololo where he unveiled her as his newest anti-corruption Tsar, Lt Col Edith Nakalema got the opportunity to interact with heads of other accountability sector agencies. This was at Parliamentary Buildings where her new headquarters and call center is located. She told them in the short time she has been operating, she has received and recorded over 10,000 corruption-related complaints from the citizens of Uganda. However, what was appalling in the experiences she shared was that Ugandans had resorted to belittling and trivializing her new office by mostly reporting petty crime cases such as one stealing the neighbor’s chicken and the area LC leaders becoming biased and failing to arrive at an equitable resolution. “Most of the reports target LC1 officials being accused of corruption in arbitration of disputes brought before them. Some are reporting a sub county chief failing to convene regular meetings or a G1 magistrate coming late for work and wrangles relating to bibanja boundaries,” Nakalema was quoted as sharing with the agency heads. She said sometimes people call to report matters as trivial as family marital disputes which clearly can be resolved by clan or religious leaders in the community.  Speaking from experience, the agency heads (whom the President had already urged to embrace as opposed to fighting Nakalema) encouraged her to carry on under the assumption that things will improve in the course of time. It’s also likely people with information exposing grand corruption are still fearful as they wait to build confidence in the new State House anti-corruption unit.