Greed, power struggles choke UWA

Although Mr Seguya’s role is to oversee operations at UWA, this newspaper has learnt that Gen. Otafiire gives directives on what decisions to take and what should be done for instance on staff deployment.

On January 28, the minister made senior staff redeployments, a role that is a preserve of the executive director as instructed by the UWA Act.

“Immediately assign Mr Charles Tumwesigye the current Conservation Area Manager of Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area, the responsibilities of Ag. Chief Conservation Manager (deputy director conservation) based at UWA head office with ‘a special task of, among the others specific to the job, directly monitoring operations of all Wildlife protected areas country-wide and directly reporting to you on daily basis,” reads one of Gen. Otafiire’s orders.

He also ordered that: “Immediately transfer Mr Nelson Guma to Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area to take charge from Mr Charles Tumwesigye, and then the current in-charge of Mgahinga National Park Mr Pontius Ezuma be assigned to take charge of Bwindi Conservation Area as Ag Conservation Area Manager.”

Other movements
In the deployment orders, the minister also assigned Mr Yunusu Musisi the responsibilities of finance and business services as acting director. The UWA Act assigns the duties of staff deployment to the executive director under the supervision of the Board of Trustees.

The minister has not appointed UWA board after the Dr Boysier Muballe-led board was last year disbanded by court because they were unqualified to supervise wildlife conservation activities.
The Muballe board is accused of bleeding UWA’s coffers through hefty allowances and also caused management chaos at the agency.

They sacked six UWA senior managers including the executive director, Mr Moses Mapesa for reportedly standing in the way of the board’s financial mission in the agency.
A court judgment secured by the employees faulted the board for their dismissal but also denied Mr Mapesa any compensation because he had been appointed by the minister without the board’s recommendation.

Mr Mapesa had averred that when reappointing him, Gen. Otafiire was performing the functions of the board since the life of the previous board had expired. Justice Yorokamu Bamwine ruled thus: “This averment cannot hold because the minister could not exercise a power which he did not have merely because the board had expired.” The judge said the minister can only appoint on recommendation of the board.

This implies that other than usurping the powers of the executive director, the current redeployments ordered by the minister were also illegal. Our investigation has also found out that the minister now uses the official stamp of the executive director to authenticate his directives.
For instance, Gen. Otafiire has also personally promoted two employees: Ms Lilian Nsubuga and Yunusu Musisi into senior acting positions.

“In the exigencies of UWA supervisory service, I have decided to appoint you as Acting Director Legal and Corporate Affairs effective 1st February 2011,” reads the minister’s letter to Ms Nsubuga.
Ms Nsubuga is a journalist and has been the agency’s spokesperson. The minister also promoted Mr Musisi to acting Director Finance.

Sources say the minister was acting on advice from some technocrats from the ministry who are silently working to break UWA’s semi-autonomous status. The source of acrimony between UWA and the ministry bureaucrats was the alleged desire by the government employees to partake of the wildlife conservation funds to which UWA has been tightfisted.

Ministers’ fuel
But early this month, the ministry managed to land on the agency’s funds after the permanent secretary ordered the body to fund the minister’s fuel for three months. “As you might be aware, Government has not released any money to the Ministry of Tourism except subventions…The purpose of this memo, therefore, is to advise you to facilitate the ministers with vehicle running fuel for the period of January to March,” reads the memo to UWA.

Several government ministries are broke after the budget was diverted to fund political campaigns.
According to the memo, Gen. Otafiire was to pocket Shs2 million per month while state minister for Tourism takes Shs1.8 million. Two other institutions, Uganda National Bureau of Standards and Uganda Industrial Research Institute,under the same ministry were directed to give Shs1.8 million each to ministers Gagawala Wambuzi and Simon Lokodo for Trade and Industry respectively.

This paper’s investigation also found out the pressure has come to bear on UWA because of the Shs10 billion trust fund that the agency’s past managers had built to sustain the agency in times of low donor funding. But the politicians and some board members wanted to take charge of the till.

Fall out
Meanwhile, our investigation shows Mr Mark Kamanzi, a legal officer, who had been rapidly promoted to act as executive director, fell out with Gen. Otafiire after he reportedly wrote to legal officers of UWA’s bankers to dishonor cheques signed by Mr Seguya.

He is also accused of reportedly trying to withdraw Shs30 million without Mr Seguya’s knowledge and paying Shs50 million to his private law firm and trying unclearly pay out $500,000 (about Shs1 billion) to a contractor. It was also alleged that the man also plucked out $6,000 (about Shs12 million) from UWA to attend a wildlife convention in the United States but did not refund money as he did not travel.
“I lost that money and someone must have stolen it but I had to take responsibility,” Mr Kamanzi told us on Thursday, “ I wrote and instructed them to recover from my salary.’’

Mr Seguya confirmed that Mr Kamanzi had been suspended. “He was not suspended by me. He was suspended by the minister, Gen. Otafiire,” he said, “I can only tell you to get comment from the minister.”

But, as Mr Kamanzi suspects, mudslinging and endemic poor governance reigns at UWA.
“It’s within their powers to carry out an investigation, so let the inquiry go through,” said Mr Kamanzi, himself a subject of the ongoing investigation headed by Mr Emmanuel Olaunah, a bureaucrat at the Tourism ministry.

Mr Kamanzi on Thursday distanced himself from alleged financial bad behavior, saying he did not pay his law firm neither did he make any illegal payment when he superintended UWA affairs albeit briefly.
“ I cannot pay Shs50 million to my firm,” he said, “ When I was nominated to chair the evaluation committee that gave the job to that firm, I disqualified myself because one of the guys in that firm was a friend.

“They have actually not paid the firm and I am not a director in that company.”
Mr Kamanzi, who asked this newspaper not to write the story, said several people were looking at the $500,000 to hang him but “ there was a contract and under that contract, we (UWA) were paying a compound interest.”

“To avoid paying compound interest, I recommended that we use money on the operations account to pay the contractor since other accounts had been blocked.”

He denied trying to deep his fingers into the wildlife conservation cash reserve, saying: “Those allegations are absolutely untrue and in bad faith. Let them investigate and the let the truth come out.”
Wildlife conservationists blame Gen. Otafiire’s abrasive leadership style for the governance crisis smoldering at UWA.

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