A notable DP MP in the 11th Parliament, from Greater Masaka, has continued to struggle with one financial problem after another.
He is always haunted by moneylenders who keep advertising his property. The DP member likes gambling, and this has previously put him into problems, including using parliamentary privileges and premises to con foreign investors who may not know enough about governance procedures in Uganda.
The MP likes living large, yet he doesn’t have the means to support that high-flying life. He always looked forward to becoming an MP as an opportunity to get himself a diplomatic passport and be able to facilitate fraudulent deal-making across borders. Of late, the MP has taken to conning foreigners seeking juicy construction deals in Uganda’s vibrant road construction sub-sector.
The showy legislator has been collecting billions from such foreign construction companies, claiming he has access to big people in government and the state house and can get them good road construction deals. But one road project has created massive problems for the greedy MP.
He took out money, saying it was the advance he would use to soften people in government and get the Ugx500bn road deal for a Turkish firm called UCA Insaat. He claimed this was to be shared with government officials. The road project in question was a tourism road adding up to more than 100 km.
Kihura-Bwizi-Rwamwanja-Kahunge and Mpara-Bwizi roads are two of the major tourism road projects in Uganda. And President Museveni has been promising upgrading that road from class C gravel to tarmac since the 2011 campaigns. Having waited for all this time, local residents are determined to politically punish Museveni should the same road not be worked on before the 2026 elections. Being MP, the DP man got information that this road was finally a priority for Museveni’s government.
The first part of the road covers 68 km, another 38 km, and another 20 km for the different local townships. It’s located in Kamwenge district, where it remarkably links up to Kibaale National Park, which, as of 2018, accounted for 6% of international tourists who came to Uganda.
A total of roughly 20,000 international tourists visited Kibaale National Park, clearly indicating its importance.
The President has been under pressure to do the roads in that part of the country in order to boost tourism, commerce, and other economic activities besides international trade between Uganda and Rwanda on one hand and with DR Congo on the other.
In spite of being economically productive, this part of the country has been choking on nearly impassable roads that are supposed to enable trade and movement of persons and motorized traffic between the Western Uganda districts of Kamwenge, Kyenjojo, Ibanda, Kiruhura, and Kazo. Drainage is equally terrible, totally complicating cargo and human traffic/movement, especially when it rains.
Some years ago, UNRA, which is charged with Uganda’s national road network, began the process to identify a contractor to do the job. This was after the GoU obtained funding from the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). Several companies put in their bids, and as always, many of them relied on commission agents to deliver successful bid participation.
That’s how the DP MP, who erroneously believes that being a member of Parliament is about nothing but money-making, got himself into the picture. He wooed the Turkish company to get involved and asked them to count on him, deceptively claiming to have the right connections at the state house, parliament, finance ministry, UNRA, state house, and the IDB itself. The procurement process was competitive, transparent, and open to all as always.
When the Turkish firm, whose advance cash the legislator had already pocketed claiming he was going to share with his contacts in the high places, didn’t succeed, the DP man began panicking while looking for people to go down with. He tried sweet-talking government insiders close to the procurement process, and when he didn’t succeed, he instigated a whistleblower who wrote to the IGG trying to blackmail Arab Contractors and government officials who had rejected his sweeteners.
Citing lack of jurisdiction, the IGG forwarded the complaint to the PPDA. The whistleblower had enumerated many things trying to soil the Egyptian-owned Arab Contractors, who had won the contract. The PPDA, as always, investigated everything through a very transparent process that saw every stakeholder given a chance to be heard, and at the end of the day, it was established that Arab Contractors had emerged as the best-evaluated bidder through a flawless public procurement process.
This was very bad news for the DP MP, who now had nothing to tell the Turkish firm’s executives from whom he had been extorting big sums of money. The IGG agreed with the PPDA findings, and this was consistent with the earlier findings of the inquiry IDB, the funder, had earlier on conducted in response to the DP MP-instigated whistleblower claims.
Not one to go down like that, the crestfallen DP MP resorted to media blackmail in order to account while deceptively indicating to his Turkish victims that all wasn’t lost as yet. Because he has a record of using journalists and leaving them in problems, the moment those he instigates them to defame sue in civil defamation, the ill-fated DP MP was rejected by all scribes in the mainstream media. He then resorted to some unregistered and UCC-unauthorized online media platforms to do his bidding.
One of them identified MNPs from the Kamwenge area, including Honorable Frank Tumwebaze, fallaciously considering him to be a soft spot. The blogger authored a lousy news story claiming that Tumwebaze, who isn’t the minister of works and doesn’t have any supervisory authority over the relevant PDE, had interfered with the procurement process in favor of the Egyptian firm. Tumwebaze, like all the other area MPs, naturally is an interested party because the road project squarely falls under Kibaale County, for which he has been area MP since 2006.
It has been his demand in cabinet, parliament, and even the NRM caucus to have this much-awaited road done to reward his Kamwenge people, who have loyally voted for the president since 1996 and aren’t about to stop doing so. As an elected politician seeking reelection in 2026, Tumwebaze (like all the other elected leaders) has a legitimate interest and every right to wish to have the road project finally delivered without further delay.
The commission agents unsuccessfully tried wooing all elected leaders from the Kamwenge area, but all of them unanimously turned their backs on them, saying that delivery of the road project is all their people wanted. The elected leaders, not just Tumwebaze, refused to be recruited into sabotage games, which could have further delayed delivery of the road project.
The commission agents wanted to use the area-elected leaders to mount pressure and cause community protests in order to blackmail the government of Uganda into cancelling the entire procurement process for the road in order to enable them (commission agents) to keep creating false hope in the minds of the Turkish firm executives, who haven’t ruled out causing the fading DP legislator to cough up all the monies that were advanced to him as an advance.
From the PPDA report, it’s clear that the DP MP is most likely going to die in his movie and self-inflicted chaos because the president is unlikely to risk not delivering such an important tourism and life-changing road for the people of that region on the eve of a major election in 2026. They have always voted for him, and he isn’t prepared to let them down.
The unregistered and UCC-unrecognized blogger that the DP legislator used over the weekend has already been sued in civil courts, where he will end up being required to pay hundreds of millions of shillings in damages for defaming Tumwebaze and other elected leaders who have legitimately been leading their people in imploring the President to deliver on his long promise that was first made during the 2011 campaigns. And besides amplifying tourism and commerce, the same road project will impact the quality of life for roughly 100,000 refugees living off the Rwamwanja refugee settlement.
