The making of new DPP Jane Frances Abodo

On May 3, 2013, Ms Abodo, then a Senior Principal State Attorney, was confident if not cocky about her case. She told Ms Sarah Langa Sui, then a Grade One Magistrate at the Anti-Corruption Court, how the State had concluded investigations into the Shs165.4b pensions scam and therefore witnesses were ready to pin the accused as and when the court was ready.
Those in the accused’s dock were mainly Ministry of Public Service officials.

Jimmy Lwamafa, the ministry’s Permanent Secretary; Stephen Kunsa Kiwanuka, the ministry’s director of research and development; Christopher Obey, the ministry’s principal accountant; Japians David Oloka, senior accountants assistant; Stephen Lwanga, an accounts assistant in the ministry; and Peter Ssajjabi, the secretary of East African Community Beneficiaries Association.

The list also had two employees of Cairo Bank, who were the bank’s assistant manager of operations, Ishaka Ssentongo, and the bank’s compliance officer, Mugeere Rahmah Nakigozi.

Twist of events
In April 2015, however, Ms Langa –Sui, who had then been promoted to the rank of Chief Magistrate and whose patience had been tested by the State, threw out the case, blaming Ms Abodo who was away completing a master’s degree in Law at Dublin University, and her team of prosecutors for failing to present a single witness for two years.

The bungling up of the case sparked off an uproar, and it was later revealed how the DPP wasn’t to blame, but that rather the case had been compromised by two detectives attached to the Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Directorate (CIID), who had authored two contradictory reports, in the process confusing Ms Abodo and her colleagues on how to proceed and prosecute the case.

Once the initial case collapsed like a pack of cards, Ms Abodo’s team went back to the drawing board and they tried to redeem the image of their office and perhaps their careers. They recharged Lwamafa, Obey and Kiwanuka with colluding to sneak a total of Shs88 billion into the Public Service Ministry budgets of 2010/2011 and 2011/2012.

The money appeared as contributions to the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), but it was never paid to the savings body. Instead, it was withdrawn by the trio via Cairo International Bank, using fictitious accounts.
In 2016, Justice Lawrence Gidudu, the head of the Anti-Corruption Court, agreed with Ms Abodo’s team and sentenced Lwamafa to seven years, Obey to 10 years while Kiwanuka got the lighter sentence of five years in jail.
2013 still was a busy year for the Anti-Corruption Court headquartered in the leafy Kololo suburb, with many big-time graft cases being filed, but this time, unlike the pensions case there, there were immediate results for Ms Abodo.

Geoffrey Kazinda, the then Principal Accountant at the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), had hogged limelight albeit for the wrong reasons, and he was soon charged at the court with a cache of corruption-related charges, which are yet to be exhausted up-to-date.

The first case to be heard was one in which he was accused of forgery and being in illegal possession of government stores. The specifics, as alleged by the State, were that Kazinda forged the signature of his boss, Mr Pius Bigirimana, the then Permanent Secretary at OPM. His intention was to steal billions of shillings, it was claimed.

When the case commenced in early 2013 before Justice David Katosi Wangutusi, conclusions within the legal circles were that Kazinda was to overrun the prosecution since he had procured services of Kampala’s top-notch lawyers, who included criminal law giant MacDusman Kabega, aided by his associate Tom Magezi, Isaac Walukagga of MMAKS Advocates and Augustine Idoot, who is now a partner at Kampala Associated Advocates (KAA).

On the other side, Ms Abodo, whose forte is white-collar and cybercrime, led a lean team of prosecutors from the DPP’s office and legal analysts opined that they would be outthought and overwhelmed by Kazinda’s nifty lawyers. They were wrong.

On June, 23, 2013, Justice Wangutusi, who currently heads the International Crimes Division (ICD), sentenced Kazinda to five years in jail, having found him guilty of 29 counts of fraud and abuse of office, earning Abodo her first big scalp.

Overturning the ruling
But this victory did not last long. In 2019, a year after Abodo had been appointed as a Judge of High Court, the Court of Appeal overturned Justice Wangutusi’s judgment, saying the evidence the judge had relied on to convict Kazinda had been planted in Kazinda’s house.

Justices Geoffrey Kiryabwire, Stephen Musota, and Percy Night Tuhaise, however, did not blame prosecution but rather the police.

“Before we take leave of this appeal, we wish to express our displeasure at the poor conduct of investigations in this case. The investigations were bungled and lacked professionalism. It left a lot to be desired.”
By the time the Court of Appeal ruled in Kazinda’s favour, he had served the five-year jail term dished out to him by Justice Wangutusi.

The conviction rate at the Anti-Corruption Court – where Abodo for eight years led the DPP’s special anti-corruption unit – stands at 90 per cent, and this moved the Uganda Law Society (USL) to crown her in 2015 the best prosecutor of that specific year.

This stellar performance, perhaps together with the fact that Karamoja Sub-region, where she hails from, had never seen any of its sons and daughters get an appointment of a judge, ensured that the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) and later President Museveni could not ignore her at the first time of asking, in 2018.

Upon swearing as a High Court judge, Yorokamu Bamwine, then Principal Judge, sought to tap into Justice Abodo’s rich history of laying strategies of nailing hardcore criminals. He dispatched her to the High Court’s Criminal Division in Kampala, where she has been handling cases ranging from rape, murder, defilement, attempted murder to aggravated robbery.

With a judge’s wig on the head, Abodo’s judicial temper was bound to be tested. It did not take long. In 2018, Brian Isiko, a student of Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Jinja branch, was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail by Buganda Road Grade One Magistrate Gladys Kamasanyu, having found him guilty of sending a barrage of love messages via telephony to Sylvia Rwabwogo, the Kabarole Woman MP.

Isiko’s actions, Kamasanyu concluded were in contravention of section 24 of the Computer Misuse Act – which talks about cyberbullying and offensive communication.

A dissatisfied Isiko decided to fight on by appealing to the High Court’s Criminal Division and his file was allocated to Justice Abodo who was in the middle of a criminal session.

In the case that had hogged a lot of media attention, Justice Abodo rubbished Kamasanyu’s decision on grounds that the magistrate didn’t follow procedures laid out in Ugandan laws when the accused demands to change his or her plea as Isiko had done.

The judge explicated that Kamasanyu ought to have explained to Isiko in his local language every detail of the charge and the corollaries of pleading guilty- something, she said the magistrate had ignored wittingly or unwittingly.

“The abuse of procedure goes to the root of the case and it affects the accused’s [Isiko] right to a fair hearing,” Justice Abodo emphatically said. Seconds later, Justice Abodo sent the file back to the Buganda Road Court for a retrial but she was very clear: the case should not be handled by Kamasanyu but rather a different magistrate. The case has since collapsed owing to Rwabwogo’s disinterest in the matter.

Mozey Radio’s case
Thereafter, Justice Abodo had to temporary leave Kampala and go to Entebbe where she had been assigned by Justice Bamwine to handle a criminal session.

Among the litany cases listed for her to handle was that of Godfrey “Troy” Wamala who was accused of murdering singer Moses Sekibogo, alias Mowzey Radio, in early 2018 in the same area. Though prosecution had insisted and fervidly submitted that Wamala had murdered Radio, Justice Abodo on October 31, 2019 adjudged what Wamala did was manslaughter and consequently handed him a 14 -year- prison sentence.

The decision to disregard the murder charge, she said, was informed by the state’s failure to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Wamala intentionally killed the singer.

She, however, agreed with the prosecution that Wamala participated in the bar brawl that catastrophically ended Radio’s life.
With the new office ahead of her, its now clear that a new duty in the Judiciary lies ahead of Justice Abodo.