How Kaka lost it at ISO

Under Kaka, a lot had gone wrong, and for so long, so much so that many believed that even the President was aware of what was happening but at least tolerated it or chose to act later. 

The way President Museveni brought Kaka’s tenure at ISO to an end has a number of similarities to how he did it in the case of Gen Kale Kayihura at the Uganda Police Force in March, 2018.

Gen Kayihura and Col Kaka, when they each led their respective agencies, developed a rivalry that attracted attention from many corners.

 At the height of the fallout, a self-proclaimed member of a criminal gang in Kampala told a news conference that they worked with the police. There was widespread speculation that was part of ISO’s job to cast the police Force under Gen Kayihura in bad light.

The police under Gen Kayihura, of course, had a lot of problems, and President Museveni would speak out openly towards the end of Gen Kayihura’s time that the police Force had been infiltrated by weevils (criminals).  

Both Gen Kayihura and Col Kaka were early recruits into the war that brought Mr Museveni to power, with the former having joined in 1982, while the latter joined in 1981. The sacking of Kaka from the helm of ISO further diminishes the number of former Bush War fighters currently running the system. 

Another former Bush War fighter, albeit a late entrant, Maj Gen Abel Kandiho, who heads the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI), has also had brushes with Col Kaka’s outfit. 

In July, a force led by CMI operatives stormed “safe houses” that were operated by ISO in Kampala, arresting a number of ISO operatives and a detainee. 

Kaka’s fate had seemingly already been sealed at that time.      
Misdeeds 
According to the Security Organisations Act 1987, which provides for the formation of ISO, the agency is mandated to receive and process intelligence data on the security of Uganda, and to advise and recommend to the President or any other authority as the President may direct, on what action should be taken in connection with that intelligence data in question.

But whereas ISO is mandated to gather and process intelligence information, no officer or employee of ISO is allowed to take action, like to arrest and detain any person that they may find to have committed any offence unless that action has first been directed by the President or any other authority directed by the President.

In cases where time is of the essence or where the matters involved are so serious, the law only allows the director general of ISO to direct the police to arrest and detain a suspect for not more than 48 hours. 

The director general of ISO is then required to use those 48 hours to advise the President on what steps to take and the President should make a decision on how to proceed on the issue within the 48 hours. 

Under Kaka, for the first time in the life of ISO, the agency operated ‘safe houses’, arresting and detaining people for extended periods of time.

In June 2018, for instance, ISO arrested Mr Simpson Birungi, the proprietor of the cosmetics company that makes Movit Products, with Mr Kaka claiming the police officers who were handling his cases had been compromised. 

ISO held Mr Birungi for days and eventually released him without charge. According to the law, ISO has no powers to arrest and detain in such cases. 

The function of processing suspects for court is for the police, and it is curious that ISO would arrest someone purporting that the police had failed to deal with their case. 

When police officers are engaged in professional misconduct they are dealt with by the Professional Standards Unit of the police, but ISO did not pursue this route. 

ISO operatives under Kaka were accused of arresting suspects with the view of extorting ransoms from them to buy back their freedom. Kaka adopted self-confessed former criminals like gangster leader Paddy Sserunjogi, aka Sobi, to do work for ISO, and such individuals have been accused of leading the creation of a cartel of extortion at the agency.  

  Brawn over brain 
Kaka, 68, is accused of replacing well trained officers with operatives with modest education and checkered criminal records. 

When Maj Gen Jim Muhwezi headed ISO in the formative years of President Museveni’s rule, he raided Makerere University and recruited young lecturers, especially in the fields of psychology and philosophy, sent them for training in the US and other countries, and deployed them in ISO. 

A number of these rose to positions of prominence within the agency, and Col Kaka is accused of having displaced most of them, replacing them with operatives of questionable credibility and records. 

As a result, knowledgeable sources say, ISO lost its ability to analyse information and every so often reports that with questionable contents are said to have been written to the President. 

Some of the inaccurate information to which the President was reportedly fed by ISO operatives under Kaka was generated due to failure of analysis, but most of it is believed to have been downright fabrications.  

One of the reports, sources say, was about the killing of former police spokesperson Andrew Felix Kaweesi, which ISO blamed on Gen Kayihura. 

Sources say a recording supposedly of Gen Kayihura thanking the killers of Kaweesi was sent to Makerere University’s School of ICT, where it was discovered to have been fabricated by piecing together voices of Gen Kayihura across different occasions and times.

President Museveni, sources say, also got concerned that ISO was in arrears of Shs15b as retirement benefits of former operatives which had remained unpaid for a long period.  

Kaka, 68, was in January 2017 recalled from his farm in Kalangala to lead ISO.