The National Unity Platform (NUP) party leadership has been accused of parading accident victims to human rights donors during resource mobilization as torture victims.
Moses Simbwa, a resident of Jinja City and also a known NUP supporter who got involved in a motor accident and sustained severe injuries, was among people paraded to Human Rights’ donors as torture victims by NUP leaders during a meeting in Kenya.
Simbwa, while riding a motorcycle, collided with a Subaru vehicle that was overtaking a sugarcane truck at Bukeeka along the Kangulumira-Njeru road mid last year and sustained severe injuries to his limbs, according to police traffic records in Njeru Municipality.
Richard Ssebuganda, a medical student at Makerere University who lost his fingers to a teargas canister explosion during the “open for all” protest, was also among the alleged torture victims.
According to his fellow students, Ssebuganda lost his fingers when the canister exploded as he tried to throw it back at the police during the riot. However, the now fully healed Ssebuganda shocked the public when he changed his testimony about this unfortunate incident in Nairobi, claiming to have lost his fingers due to torture.
Farouk Kirunda, the deputy presidential press secretary, tweeted on November 26, 2022, “Lies take the elevator, but the truth takes the stairs and arrives faster.”
Kirunda further tweeted that “the case of Moses Simbwa, a well-known accident victim from Jinja paraded as a victim of torture in Nairobi, is one such glaring example of NUP’s act of shame. Big shame! FK,”
In an interview with NTV-Uganda recently, Ssbuganda admits that the government stepped in to help him after medical bills became too much to bear by the family.
However, this recent revelation has sparked public debate, raising questions about why the NUP would go to such lengths as to use someone whose bills were paid for by the government.
Another source who also attended the Nairobi human rights conference by the opposition, including NUP and FDC, among others, revealed that the paraded victims were paid money to be used as torture victims in a bid to convince donors for more funding.
The source notes that the move was to aid NUP’s appeal to human rights donors, whose representatives also attended the conference since they had demanded concrete physical examples of the victims.