By John V Sserwaniko
Bornwell Kantande, who has been the UNHCR Country Representative for Uganda has been recalled (or in simple terms fired) over matters reliable sources insist relate to the refugee inflation scandal that the OPM continues grappling with. To their credit, our colleagues of the Daily Monitor broke this scandal on February 5th 2018 showing how the donor community was concerned that a lot of things had gone wrong in the refugee project operated by the GoU in close collaboration with the UN agencies like UNHCR and WFP. Quoting UN Resident Coordinator Rosa Malango, the Daily Monitor rightly pointed out the donor community concerns to include inflation of the refugee population (creating ghost refugees in the Ugandan speak), misappropriation of food assistance meant for refugees, manipulation of the food logs, solicitation of bribes from refugees seeking registration and attestation letters, misappropriation of land meant for refugee settlements, misappropriation of scholarship opportunities meant for refugees and complicity in trafficking of minor-aged refugees for forced marriage in other countries. Dated 26th January and addressed to Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, Rosa Malango’s letter also accuses refugee project officials of manipulatively interfering in the election of refugee community leaders for the different refugee settlements to ensure their accomplices occupy office and keep away those that would have blown the whistle.
BORNWELL KNIFING:
Now being the overall UNHCR boss in Uganda, Bornwell Kantande stands accused of not only failing to do enough to avert these blatant abuses in the refugee program but also of possible complicit in the scandal. And the donor agencies that contribute towards refugee responses want comprehensive investigations to ensure heads continue to roll even at UNHCR whose bosses are understood to have been feuding Uganda OPM officials over deals. Mulengera news website has seen a one page short letter the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Fillipo Grandi has written to the Ugandan government announcing the knifing of Bornwell Kantande. Dated 6th February, Grandi’s letter announces Joel Boutrue, a French diplomat, as the new UNHCR Country Representative in Uganda. “I would therefore be grateful if you would confirm that the proposed appointment of Mr. Boutroue as UNHCR Representative in the Republic of Uganda meets with your agreement. I take this opportunity to convey my gratitude for the invaluable support UNHCR receives from your government,” partly reads Grande’s letter exclusively addressed to Refugee line Minister Hillary Onek. Without wasting time and as if he was also tired of Bornwell Kantande, Onek the next day wrote to Foreign Affairs Minister Sam Kutesa urging him to prepare to see off Mr. Bornwell Kantande and receive Mr. Joel Boutroue as his successor.
THE INSIDE STORY:
This news website has reliably been told by very reliable sources inside the UNHCR that Mr. Fillipo Grande is taking this action to actually save Bornwell Kantande from the impending embarrassment regarding previous efforts at cover up of things that have gone wrong in the refugee sector. We are reliably informed that besides being investigated for possible complicit in the scandals Malango raises in her email to Rugunda, there are many other areas on which Bornwell Kantande risks burning his fingers regarding what has gone wrong in the UNHCR office and related operations in Uganda during his tenure. One of the scandalous areas that the Bornwell Kantande-led UNHCR Kampala office covered up and never reported to their supervisors in Geneva occurred recently involving the disappearance of the refugee food trucks in transit. It affected refugees on one of the Western Uganda refugee settlement routes assigned to an NGO called Samaritan Food.
Sources say the transportation trucks carrying the food mysteriously disappeared and never reached intended destination, condemning the intended beneficiaries in the refugee camps to starvation to which some of them succumbed and lost life. It’s suspected that some officials at both WFP and UNHCR were complicit in this unexplained disappearance of the food trucks. No action was taken on the NGO and the contracted transportation firm were never reprimanded. To his supervisors in Geneva, this soiled the good reputation Bornwell Kantande had built for years. There are also concerns as to why Bornwell hadn’t intervened despite persistent reports of food being misappropriated especially meant for Somali refugees that would come to pick relief food as groups claiming to pick for other Somali community members that are unable to come by themselves.
It took the intervention of the authorities at the OPM office writing a November letter that put an end to this practice through which billions were being lost annually in food fraud. The OPM circular to field offices clearly indicated each group/individual beneficiary should pick their own food as opposed to being represented at the food collection centers. As a result, within one month, the number of Somali refugees eligible for food rations diminished from 9,000 to less than 7,000. WFP was very pleased and wrote to Rugunda thanking the OPM for this timely intervention. Instead the guys in UNHCR were very displeased with this intervention by the OPM whose (non implementation) work mostly in the refugee operations is oversight and coordination. The actual food distribution is done the NGOs contracted by UNHCR whose field return reports are routinely filed with their employer UNHCR and copied to the OPM as a matter of courtesy. It’s also alleged that, for unknown reasons, Bornwell wasn’t very enthusiastic about the verification/validation exercise the OPM kick-started recently to establish the exact number of refugees. It’s also saddening that the UNHCR office under Bornwell’s leadership has been feuding with the OPM over who should handle refugee registration this being the point at which ghost refugees have always been created and smuggled into the system.
FRUSTRATING THE NEW SYSTEM:
It’s also alleged that many of the NGOs which Bornwell-led UNHCR Kampala office has been contracting are
shady with dubious background shrouded in fraudulent practices and yet despite having the information, Bornwell never acted to clean up things. What made things even worse was the fact that the UNHCR Kampala office was resistant to the refugee management information (auditing) system the OPM was trying to put in place to identify and cancel out ghost refugees off the records whenever detected. The new refugee management information system would incorporate finger print impressions and thereby making impossible the existence of ghost refugees. Ironically, the UNHCR Kampala office not only frustrated this intervention by the OPM (by withholding funding support) but was also insisting to be the one to control and implement this new refugee information system. There were wrangles as to where the data would be hosted. The UNHCR insisted it will be hosted outside the country, something to which the GoU/OPM objected citing sovereignty concerns. The wrangling saw UNHCR cancel the original offer to buy servers to enable the OPM maintain and upgrade the modest information system they have in place. Bornwell-led UNHCR office in Kampala was very bitter with the GoU/OPM in 2014 when the mandate of registration of refugees was removed from UNHCR to be directly handled by the OPM. Mulengera news website is reliably informed that the UNHCR office didn’t take this lightly. They never forgave the GoU officials and reacted by withholding some of the technical and logistical support to the government of Uganda (GoU). Consequently, the UNHCR insisted on having their own refugee management information system which scandalously cost the organization Shs8bn compared to the GoU that required only Shs1.5bn to have the same system in place. Under Bornwell’s leadership, the UNHCR office has been in the process to wastefully/extravagantly recruit consultants and other expatriates to work on the project that supervisors in Geneva saw as poor prioritization by the Kampala office. The OPM officials have been grumbling about Bornwell’s insistence on foreign expatriates on grounds that this kills Ugandans’ initiative and innovativeness to develop IT-enabled solutions.
BORNWELL SPEAKS OUT:
In a phone call, Bornwell has this morning told Mulengera news website that “this is news to me because I haven’t seen those letters you are talking about.” He insisted he would only give his side of the story when he gets to see the letters we are referring to regarding his recall back to Geneva for fresh assignment. To comment on this & other Mulengera news stories, reach us on 0703164755!
