Nandala Mafabi, the Budadiri West MP
A section of legislators on Parliament Accounts Committee (PAC) have called on Police to start charging the “Very Important Persons” (VIPs) who seek out for personalized security, arguing that the concentration of security towards a certain group of people is denying other Ugandans such services.
This followed concerns raised in the June 2021 Auditor General’s where the Auditor General, highlighted that in 2020/2021, Uganda Police only completed investigations for 331,584 cases, leaving a backlog of 445,976 whose investigations are yet to commence or be completed.
Further, out of the 445,976 backlogs of cases, 291,060 have been pending for three or more years.
The findings prompted MPs to ask the Deputy Inspector General of Police, Geoffrey Tumusiime Katsigazi to explain why the Force is closing some police stations across the country in the midst of all these case backlogs, to which he blamed the decision on shortage of man power citing cases of some police stations having only 2 police officers to man a population of 50,000.
Nandala Mafabi (Budadiri West) said, “I have heard police crying about manpower, but I have seen some MPs with about 20 police men guarding them, now that means VIPs are depriving the poor. What is the criteria? Why don’t you advise these people who want security to go to the private security guards instead of going to police that would protect the poor?”
He was backed by Fredrick Angura (Tororo South) who said charging the VIPs would be a source of revenue for Government or else have these people hire private security.
In response, Katsigazi informed the Committee that sometimes the need to beef up security for certain individuals comes as a directive and it is beyond the control of Police administration, citing a decision made in 2018 by President Museveni okaying MPs to ask for sharp shooters with lead cars yet there was no additional budget, thus leading to the depletion of the Police budget.
He said, “Some of these things are a bit out of our hands. We are now looking at reviewing our deployment plans, because security threats, some of them have time limits, but now you may not need it. So we are going to look at the numbers and necessity, whether we can still afford or not. And even if the directive came from somewhere else, we will go there and tell the originator of the directive that police can no longer afford, what should be the alternative.”
However, Nandala insisted on having these VIPs charged, wondering the criteria Police uses to define VIPs, after some MPs cited a case of socialite Sheila Gashumba who was recently pictured walking around with Police escorts and some of them holding her handbag.
“You close a police post which is guarding a community, you provide Nandala with 10 police men because he has his own issues of death and whatever, yet the man you are guarding is single, yet the community has about 50,000 people, don’t you think by the time you went to close those police stations, you should have dealt with the VVIPs, and these people are just assumed VVIPS, they have nothing called VIP. Why don’t you charge like hiring of cars, police officers and guns?” said Mafabi.
