Businessman knocks dead one-year-old boy

Lyantonde. Police in Lyantonde District are investigating circumstances under which an Asian national knocked down a one-year-old boy last week.
The deceased identified as Israel Ntoni, was son of the Lyantonde District Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Officer, Ms Ruth Nakawala.
The suspect, 31, is a resident of Lyantonde Town and also a neighbour of Ms Nakawala. He also operates a hardware shop in the town.

According to Ms Nakawala, she was away on official duty when her son was knocked down and her maid did not know how the boy moved out of the family house and ended up in the parking yard.
A police officer, who preferred anonymity but recorded the statement at police, said the suspect reported to police immediately after the incident, was interrogated and he pleaded guilty.

Mr Ibin Ssenkumbi, the southern regional police spokesperson, confirmed the incident, saying investigations are ongoing. According to an eye witness, the boy’s head was flattened and suffered severe bleeding which led to his death.
However, Ms Nakawala has since dropped the charges against the suspect, saying she was convinced that it was an accident. “I will not ask for any compensation because no money is worth a life,” Ms Nakawala said.

editorial@ug.nationmedia.com

Elected leaders have a role to play in overseeing road maintenance

By Michael M. Odongo
Posted 


Thursday, March 31 

2016 at 

01:00

The 2016 general election brought into office new leaders at both central and local governance structures. To all those leaders, hearty congratulations from Uganda Road Fund, the organisation set up to finance routine and periodic maintenance of public roads from lines of funding that include mainly road user charges.

Uganda’s road network is estimated at well over 80,000kms. Institutions charged with management and development of this vital asset include the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), which has responsibility over the 21,000km national main highways and Kampala Capital City Authority for the 1,100Km Kampala roads. District roads amount to some 22,500kms and are managed by district local governments. The districts also have sub-agency relationship with town councils and sub-counties for overseeing performance of the lower local governments in managing their local roads. Sub-counties in particular oversee community access roads.

Funding from Road Fund permeates throughout this spectrum of designated agencies. UNRA takes well over 65 per cent of the road fund budget for since they are looking after national roads that convey 80 per cent of the road-based traffic while the rest is shared between KCCA and the local governments. For the financial year 2016/17, the road fund budget stands at Shs417b.
The founding Uganda Road Fund Act 2008 confers upon elected leaders at both central and local level the responsibility to provide oversight over road works. Every district must have a district roads committee in whose ranks are district chairman, mayors of local authorities in the district, Members of Parliament from the district, Chief Administrative Officer, district engineer, Secretary for Works and municipal engineer as listed in Section 25(2) of the URF Act. Station engineer of nearest UNRA station may attend in observer status. Only the MPs or chairman of the district are eligible for election by members as committee chairman. The law recognises the district engineer as the secretary of the committee.
The committee considers and approves district-wide annual road maintenance programmes of the district and its town councils and sub-county sub-agencies and clears the resultant performance agreements for signature with the road fund. There is year round role for the committees to track performance of the programmes, ensuring all time physical and financial accountability of resources. As such, it conducts its affairs through meetings, field inspections and filing regular reports and minutes of meetings to URF.
The Fund provides for cost of committee work, including reimbursement of travelling expenses of members. The committees work in close coordination with councils of districts and lower local authorities within its geographical bound. Accounting officers of districts and municipalities should declare to members budgets, income and expenditure for road maintenance as well as all physical and financial accountability reports to URF. The committee should also interface with UNRA local representation to keep track of road maintenance programmes in the district. The committees also play a supportive role in respect of facilitating access to private land for quarrying road materials, promoting road safety and coordinating with enforcement organs to fight overloading of roads.
The outgoing elected leaders, including members of the 9th Parliament, performed well on constituting the committees in 98 per cent of the districts. However, their record of overseeing road works in the districts was abysmal; many did not file reports to URF. Reasons for this were mainly explained in terms of political intolerance of members, especially where parties differed and clash of timetable.
The new leaders should endeavour to fully operationalise these committees in their districts and work around challenges to ensure the committees fulfill their mandate. One issue of concern is the inefficiencies in road maintenance financing, leading to losses of funds either through wasteful expenditures, corruption or end-year return to the Treasury.
Over the next five years, we project to disburse in excess of Shs5 trillion to agencies. It will be unfortunate for such huge investment to be to be left without due oversight. It is important that the districts rise to the task mandated to them in law to oversee use of these resources. It should also not be lost on MPs that the URF law is still work in progress because we are yet to access the mandated line of road user charges mandated by section 21 of the URF Act 2008. Accordingly, the 10th Parliament needs to fully operationalise the road fund by amending Section 14 of the URA Act to ensure predictability of road maintenance funding.
As a way forward, as soon as the new political leaders are sworn in, the Chief Administrative Officers should call for an inaugural meeting to elect chairpersons of the district roads committees and set the agenda for operations. There are guidelines in the districts in lieu of the regulations, which the Minister for Finance is yet to gazette.
The Uganda Road Fund is optimistic that over the next five years, district roads committees will gain ground and play their role in overseeing road maintenance programmes in agencies. We shall take stock of their performance at mid-term in 2018 and end-term in 2021.

Dr Odongo is the Executive Director, Uganda Road Fund.

FDC woos police to join ‘free my vote’ campaign prayers

Masaka District police commander, Mr John Mwaule, speaks to FDC’s organising secretary for Masaka sub-region, Mr Joseph Ssenzoga. PHOTO BY MARTINS E. SSEKWEYAMA 

By MARTINS E. SSEKWEYAMA
Posted 


Thursday, March 31 

2016 at 

01:00

In Summary

Seeking a higher power. The campaign that includes praying every Tuesday across different party offices started early this month.

Masaka. Forum for Democratic Change leadership in Masaka District has wooed police officers in the sub-region to join them in the “Free my Vote” campaign.
The FDC enthusiasts led by Mr Joseph Ssenzoga, the party’s organising secretary for the sub-region, made the request to a group of anti-riot police officers commanded by Mr John Mwaule, the district Police commander, that blocked the ‘Free my Vote’campaign prayers.

The group had converged at the party offices located on Elgin Road in Masaka Town; in line with their “Free my Vote” campaign prayers. But they were ordered to call off the prayers and vacate the place or risk arrest.
The campaign that includes praying every Tuesday across the country at the different party offices started early this month.
Mr Mwaule subsequently ordered Pastor Umar Zzimbe of Kirimya Pentecostal Church who had been invited to lead the prayers to leave the venue, before ordering other FDC supporters to take back all the chairs and tables they were using.

After they were successfully dispersed, the enraged FDC supporters started preaching to police personnel to join them in prayers instead of running after them. “You also share the same problems as we do. Let us join hands and consistently find solutions to our challenges instead of harassing us,” Mr Ssenzoga told the DPC, as other supporters chanted the party slogan. In response, Mr Mwaule cautioned the FDC supporters against using what he described as provocative language and advised them to organise their activities within the confines of the law. Last week, FDC party members in Masaka District conducted their prayers uninterrupted although police had threatened to block them.
But Mr Robert Tumwesigye, the FDC organising secretary for Masaka District, vowed not to halt their prayers despite police interference, saying their intention was not to cause chaos but to exercise their constitutional right of freedom of expression.

editorial@ug.nationmedia.com

Your lordships, that big thing you are feeling but can’t see is an elephant in the courtroom

By Daniel K. Kalinaki
Posted 


Thursday, March 31  

2016 at 

01:00

The Supreme Court will today deliver its judgment on the petition filed by Amama Mbabazi challenging the outcome of the February 18 presidential election in which the Electoral Commission declared candidate Yoweri Museveni the winner.
It is not clear whether Mr Mbabazi will be in court to hear the outcome of his petition but it is almost certain that Kizza Besigye, who came second in the results announced by the EC will not, seeing as he has been under house arrest since just after Election Day.
This is not a footnote to this case. This – the fact that the two leading candidates were under “preventive arrest” as election results were being declared, among others, – is the invisible elephant in the courtroom. To understand this, we need to go back to previous elections, but in particular to 2006.
If you close your eyes for a minute and think of an electoral illegality, it probably took place in that election. There were threats against Opposition candidates, ballot stuffing, ghost voters, ghost polling stations, missing voters on the roll, unusually high turnout, et cetera. On the eve of the election, a government functionary shot at a crowd of Opposition supporters, at high noon, killing two and maiming three (he was only brought to trial three years later when this newspaper exposed attempts to throw out the case, and sentenced to 14 years). Besigye, leading Opposition candidate then as now, lost half his campaign time in jail, battling two charges, one of which a judge ruled had been trumped up with the sole purpose of derailing his candidature.
Yet when Besigye and his lawyers turned up in court to challenge the election, they came along with a statistician from Makerere University and attempted to show the court the ‘substantiality’ of these irregularities on the outcome.
This, in my unlearned view, was a mistake. The framers of the law envisaged a situation whereby, for administrative or other reasons, some voters may be unable to vote, where some ballots are destroyed or stuffed. For instance, if voting materials did not arrive in sub-county X with 50,000 voters, it would not make sense to annul the election if the winning margin was two million votes.
But how do you measure the number of votes a candidate loses by being unable to campaign for half the allotted time? How do you measure the lost opportunity if a public broadcaster funded by taxpayers gives airtime to only one candidate at the expense of rivals? Can one claim that they could have converted a million voters if they had been allowed equal airtime, and can this claim be proven statistically? Can one count the number of would-be voters who decide to stay at home or vary their voting intention after witnessing election-related violence?
This, in my view, is a qualitative argument, not a quantitative one. It is a judgement call, not a mathematical equation. In the famous words of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who was being asked to determine whether scenes in a movie could be classified as “hard-core pornography” said, of pornography, “I know it when I see it”.
We can tick off a checklist in seeking to determine whether an election was held in accordance with the law, and in identifying those events that fell outside the law but determining the effect on broad and entrenched illegalities are a subjective matter of conscience and common sense, not calculus. Substantiality is not synonymous with statistical impact, for you can’t put a number to that which you can’t count.

I will eat my boots if the Supreme Court rules to annul the election – I think the evidentiary threshold on many of the blatant violations was not met and the arguments by the petitioner’s lawyers could have been more cogent – but I hope that the court will roll back the statistical requirement for substantiality on things that just can’t be measured.

Justice might be blind, limiting itself only to the law, facts and evidence, but if the honourable men and women of the Supreme Court delicately walk around in the dark feeling that huge thing that has been brought into their midst they surely will be able to tell that that, there, is the elephant in the room.

Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. dkalinaki@ke.nationmedia.com Twitter: @Kalinaki

Teachers face sack over poor performance

Mr Moses Kizige, the MP-elect for Bugabula North Constituency. File photo 

Kamuli. Mr Moses Kizige, the MP-elect for Bugabula North Constituency, has issued an ultimatum to primary school teachers in Kamuli District to either revisit their teaching methods and or be sacked.
Mr Kizige, also a senior presidential aide, issued the ultimatum on Tuesday at Balawoli Church of Uganda Primary School while handing over 3,500 revision booklets that the Speaker of Parliament, who is also the Kamuli District Woman MP, Ms Rebecca Kadaga, donated to PLE candidates in the district.
“It is not going to be business as usual because we want results and every child to benefit and value added to schools so you either perform or ship out,” he warned.
Mr Kizige commended Ms Kadaga for her efforts at improving academic standards in Busoga, saying the Shs540 million investment will help create a future substantial human resource.

editorial@ug.nationmedia.com

Time to address turmoil in the banking sector

Earnings season for financial year 2015/2016 is due at the end of the next quarter. Financial services and information and communications technology were hailed at one time as the natural replacement for agriculture and industry where growth has largely lagged behind. This straight face extended to phantom earnings published out of the tourism sector to the tune of $1 billion when most hotels barely register 20 per cent annual occupancy.
However, a country’s banking sector is not a joking matter. The collapse of UCB in the 1990s on the back of a botched sale to Westmont Holdings wreaked havoc to communities, some of which permanently fell off the economic grid.
In the mid-2010s, another quiet transformation is taking place in the economy. There are more banks in the country as our 37 million population may dictate. However, Uganda’s economy remains a paltry $14 billion in size, middling and unstable. The growth of the private sector has been arrested by the rapid growth in the size of government. Government is expanding at a faster rate than the private sector.
The nature of this relationship – when government grows faster – requires more taxes to feed the big brother. Personal income taxes since 2012 have clocked in at 40 per cent plus a 10 per cent surcharge on incomes over Shs120 million per annum. Employers on top of this have to provide for another 10 per cent cap payable to the National Social Security Fund.
In 2014, government – after maxing out direct taxes – turned to indirect taxes with great effect. It adopted excise duties on fees levied by commercial banks on services rendered to customers. Excise duties normally associated with manufacturing creeped into the service sector with a 10 per cent surcharge on each fee banks levy. Banks (lazy on loans and growing fat on fees were already vulnerable) simply deduct these fees from each transaction. This effect, especially on fees which affect the lower income customers, has been devastating. Overdraft fees, holding charges, minimum balance charges all attract an excise duty.
The story of non-performing loans is growing steadily. From 2014 to 2015, one of the largest loans ever in Uganda in the aviation sub-sector failed with a 100 per cent write-off. Not a single plane ever hit the skies. It nearly matched the raid on the liquidation account at the Registrar of Companies 10 years before to fund another bird in the sky that never took off.
One of the major banks seemed to weather the storm by spawning an unsustainable real estate business. For each loan that fails, its affiliate steps in to remodel premises, sprucing them up for rent. But this curve will soon start to invert under pressure from a shrinking business sector.
Pressure on mobilisation of funds is likely to expose banks in the near term to new tax levies on customer deposits. The delay in oil revenue will put more pressure on government to meet its obligations. In 2015/2016, government has limped from quarter to quarter, shuffling its obligations while struggling to meet huge interest payments on Shs900 billion in current annual borrowing requirements or 15 per cent of the Budget. Eurozone guidelines recommend just 3 per cent annual deficits, 6 per cent is deemed irresponsible so 15 per cent is simply drunk.

After the census report was silent on both unemployment, concentrating on outdated labels (religion and tribe for instance), government may be forced to do something about unemployment. But just like the banks now limping, it may not be able to do much – the huge deficit has sucked up domestic resources for investment and employment.

Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law and an Advocate. kssemoge@gmail.com

Six children kidnapped in two months

BUSIA. Police in Busia have decried the increasing cases of children being kidnapped in the district.
A new police report released at the weekend indicates that six children have been kidnapped in the district from January to February by unknown assailants.
The Bukedi regional police spokesperson, Mr Sowali Kamulya, told Daily Monitor that the rate at which children are being kidnapped is worrying the security team and locals.
“We have started investigating the cause of this. Unknown assailants are targeting only school children,” Mr Kamulya said last Sunday.

He explained that out of six children kidnapped, one was killed, four are still missing and one was found.
He identified the deceased as Hassan Wesamba, a Primary Six pupil at Madibira Primary School.
He was found dead near an imcomplete building in Mawero Village in Busia.
Mr Abdu Wesamba, the father of the deceased, told Daily Monitor that his son was kidnapped by unknown assailants as he played with other children in Solo Village.
He revealed that a day after his child was kidnapped, he received strange calls from someone who demanded Shs3m to have his son released.

Mr Kamulya also identified one of the children who are still missing as Justine Amukyebe, 2. Noah Malumba, 7, a pupil of St Jude Nursery Primary School, was found.
According to police, after unknown assailants have kidnapped the children, they start demanding between Shs3m and Shs15m ransom.
Mr Kamulya said since then, they have arrested several people in connection with the crime to help police with investigation.

editorial@ug.nationmedia.com