By Mulengera Reporters
During the Saturday Capital Gang Ofwono Opondo gave away his former ally Anita Among by saying she wouldn’t have ended up in the mess she is currently facing if she had been advisable and accepted his advice which was given at the height of the Parliament Exhibition.
Opondo said when Toko and Agatha Atuhaire-led AGORA started their X posts dedicated to exposing corruption at Parliament, he got overwhelmed with the extent of rot. He rang Anita Among to ask what’s going on. The Bukedea Woman MP was characteristically indifferent and defensive in her response.
She registered her contempt for AGORA and told Ofwono Opondo she didn’t feel obliged to explain herself in response to what she called mere rumors and hearsay. Opondo says he told her leadership is about accountability and a leader has to explain him or herself to even a journalist in response to media reports. The ill-advised Among, who prided in surrounding herself with sycophants and not independent-minded advisors like OO, remained contemptuous of the likes of AGORA and ended up going to war with even bigger media giants such a the NMG Uganda comprising of Daily Monitor, the larger than life NTV and other outlets whose combined audience is in millions.
Opondo says he remained unconvinced with Anita Among’s dismissive approach because there can simply never be a smoke without fire. He declined being among those to defend Among against what AGORA, whose content was too detailed to be dismissed, was saying under the Parliament Exhibition. That the next thing Among did was to run to the President along with her Deputy Thomas Tayebwa.
They told the President they had a problem because Opondo, who was government spokesman as of that time, was on their case and that he had joined those bashing them, using his weekly newspaper column. Opondo says Gen Museveni told them to go and explain themselves to him because he had known him over the preceding 25 years to be ‘an old man who is objective and never vindictive.’
He says its Among and Tayebwa who confessed to him about how the President had shut them up. He now says its indeed true a lot of things had gone wrong the way AGORA was reporting which is why the Chris Obores and others are formally on trial. He said he realized a lot of things didn’t have to happen, including MPs being required to borrow or use personal money to do Parliament work and claim refund on return to the station.
He also agrees it was problematic for the budget of the Speaker’s office to grow from around Shs3bn, where Jacob Oulanyah left it, to Shs28bn where Anita Among had taken it. He says he is aware that could only happen with approval of the President but who he says could easily have been misled by Among and people at the Finance Ministry.
Opondo also says he has realized that the law and the rules give the Speaker a lot of powers, which is unnecessary. That he is determined to engage Oboth-Oboth to find a way on how a lot of things can change. Opondo also observed that the fact that the Speaker’s office continues to be labeled a crime scene is indicative that the AGORAs (many of whose youthful followers got locked up at the instigation of Anita Among) had a point.
And says Anita Among would have averted a real crisis if she had taken their whistle blowing seriously. Opondo also confessed to have been an undercover spy/journalist at Parliament from the early 1990s when he said he started seeing MPs extorting money from accounting officers who would appear before them to answer accountability questions. He also regretted the fact that absolute power corrupted his former ally Anita Among absolutely, which is why and how she ended up into the current quagmire.
Opondo also proposed that time had come for the Commissioners of Parliament to be voted by the MPs themselves and that the same should happen to Committee Chairpersons so that MPs can have authority over them, including recall in case someone turns out to be corrupt while engaging in anomalous conduct. He says this can be achieved through the leadership of Parliament and senior cadres like him deliberately engaging the President to array whatever fears he might be having as a result of such power being taken away from CEC which he currently controls in his capacity as NRM party chairman.
Opondo also declined to contradict what studio guests like Toko and former LoP Wafula Oguttu, who claimed to have reliably been informed by very senior MPs that the current budget for FY2026/27 has up to Shs2trn which was smuggled into it to cater for kickbacks for MPs sitting on the different committees of Parliament. Wafula Ogutu, a very respected veteran investigative journalist, said that that is meant to be shared between the influential/vocal MPs and the accounting officers at the different government MDAs.
That the Committee chairpersons are the conduits through whom the kickbacks in hundreds of millions for Committee members are channeled from the respective accounting officers. Opondo admitted this is very possible because himself, when still head of Uganda Media Center, he was one time approached by a Committee chairperson who proposed that an additional Shs6bn be allocated to his vote on condition that he will withdraw it and find a way of sharing it with Committee members. Opondo said he declined and that partly explains why for such a long time the Media Center remained one of the many unfunded priorities of government.
Other panelists disputed the reason why the Speaker’s office should be allocated so many billions of shillings ostensibly to facilitate donations. Lydia Wanyoto observed that Anita Among had become so powerful to the extent that it took courage, fearlessness and being ready to die for people like herself to come out as early as January to declare they wanted to stand for Speakership at the time she too was personally still interested in the position.
Panelists were also shocked to learn that the Anita Among leadership had budgeted to send a delegation of more than 30 MPs who would travel for this year’s world cup at a cost of Shs100m to be expended on each legislator. This was condemned as sheer opulence and insensitivity given the fact that many hospital projects continue to be stalled simply because the government is broke and lacks money to do everything at this point in time. Toko said that the extent of what went wrong at Parliament under Anita Among’s tenure is much worse than Ugandans know so far. As a way forward, panelists demanded that the Auditor General becomes more deliberate when auditing Parliament and that more transparency gets introduced into the Parliament’s budget. It was also recommended that the leadership at Parliament stops blocking accountability committees from processing aspects of the AG’s audit reports relating to the Parliament of Uganda.
Besides demanding a comprehensive and officially-released brief detailing what exactly happened or went wrong under Anita Among, Wanyoto supported calls for a comprehensive audit inquiry to establish the full extent of what went wrong regarding financial and human resource recruitment decisions. Opondo claimed that he has it on good authority that 30% of the staff recruited during Anita Among’s period are either in-laws or girlfriends/ boyfriends of influential MPs and Ministers. He said he knows of many Ministers whose wives continue to work at Parliament where they earn a lot of money for doing nothing or so little. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
