Following the chaos that was caused by the Mityana legislator Hon Zaake on the floor of parliament on 29th November 2023, the Deputy Speaker Rt. Hon Thomas Tayebwa tasked the leader of the opposition, Hon Mpuga Mathias, to submit a list of the alleged missing persons.
Mpuga, who was not in plenary session then, was tasked to submit a fresh list of missing persons- a plea he has since declined to adhere to because according to highly placed sources in Bobi Wine’s National unity Platform (NUP), the names that were initially submitted were fake and meant to taint Uganda’s image for political grandstanding.
In the recently concluded conference in Nairobi, Bobi Wine and some of his supporters ferried accident victims and displayed them as torture victims to their funders.
The parading of fake torture victims, according to some NUP members of Parliament, especially the former Democratic Party members, justified that Bobi wine and his cohort are after appeasing their donors instead of championing the cause they pretend to be perusing.
According to a section of NUP Members of Parliament, Hon Mpuga, who is in the disgruntled faction of NUP leaders has refused to resubmit the fake lists of missing persons after he realized that a certain group of their colleagues is pushing a false and unfounded narrative of the missing persons for political gains unlike what is publicly claimed.
According to Police, the initial lists submitted in March were investigated and a report was produced of who was being held by Police and who was not. According to the sources in NUP who preferred anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case, many names were of people who had died a long time ago, and others were names of non-existent persons.
When contacted by this publication, Hon. Mpuga declined to comment about this because of the recently boiling tensions in NUP between the People Power Movement and NUP MPs over continuous disagreements on their Modus Operandi.
Sadab Kitata, who is the press secretary to the Leader of opposition, has on many occasions attributed the ever-increasing tensions in the NUP camp, to Bobi Wine’s insatiable appetite for donor funds and love for strongman syndrome.
In a meeting that was held in the office of the Leader of Opposition at parliament 5th floor South wing, Mpuga is quoted grumbling of blackmail. “We are sick and tired of the blackmail politics of our colleagues in Kamokya, it’s not sustainable. It’s not something I would like to be part of,” he said.
The plight of the alleged torture victims came to light when Moses Simbwa was paraded on 17th November 2022 during the Uganda Human Rights Accountability Conference which was organized by the Kenya Human Rights Commission at Ufungano House in Nairobi. It was later revealed that Simbwa was an accident victim in Jinja. Another Victim that was paraded and later turned out to be a fake case was Richard Ssebuganda, a former Medical student who lost his fingers to a tear gas canister while participating in a Makerere University Strike.
