Henry Musasizi, Minister of State for Finance
Government has declined to provide the list of some of the individuals that have benefitted from Uganda Development Bank loans, citing the confidentially clause the Bank has with its clients.
This is despite the fact that the same Bank is seeking approval of Parliament to borrow US$175Million (Shs 641.344Bn) from BADEA for its capitalisation and guarantee UDB to directly borrow US$100Million (Shs366.429Bn) for its activities.
The stand was taken by Henry Musasizi, Minister of State for Finance while responding to a concern raised by Godfrey Onzima (Aringa North) who noted that although all Ugandan taxpayers are funding UDB, the Bank is being run like a Kampala affair with no presence in all regions of the country, other than the Central region.
“All the information the colleague wants us to provide is available in our records. However, this is the Bank that deals with the private sector and there is a client relationship which the Bank has with its borrowers and one of the conditions is that the Bank shall confidentially keep the information of its clients. This question isn’t new, it has arisen before and when it arose, we preferred to share information with you Speaker, but not with the Public,” said Minister Musasizi.
Onzima noted that although the loan approval was halted pending harmonisation of outstanding issues by Government, the Ministry of Finance still fell short of addressing the key issue of inequity through the provision of the list of individuals that have benefitted from UDB loans and demanded UDB to establish presence at regional level.
He said, “When we went into privatisation, we privatised all Government Banks and we have been talking about UDB and trying to capitalise it but this seems to be a bank centralised in Kampala where the money is accessed by very few people. I wanted to know from Government when at least they will centralise it at least to regional level because we are talking of UDB, it doesn’t portray any national characteristics and even if one goes there to access money, there are hurdles you jump until you give up. You can’t know who are the people accessing money from this UDB. It seems to be a bank for some specific people.”
