Museveni greeting leaders from Acholi Sub Region in Gulu on August 18, 2025 during the stakeholders’ meeting for cattle compensation for Acholi-Photo By Simon Wokorach
The Attorney General is stuck with 252.2 billion shillings meant for cattle compensation of Northern Uganda over a disparity in the information about the claimants.
The Deputy Attorney General Jackson Kafuuzi revealed this at Gulu Core Primary Teachers’ College on Monday while presenting the status of cattle compensation in the region.
The reports presented indicated that while the government has earmarked 506.7 billion for compensating the claimants, 252.2 billion has been allocated to claimants whose details do not match.
The reports highlighted double compensation claims, sharing of national identification numbers, while some of the beneficiaries are children without letters of administration.
“We have 506.7 billion unverified claims, but 252.2 billion is queried because we can’t establish the actual beneficiaries,” Kafuuzi told Museveni.
The funds established are meant to compensate 12,110 claimants in Acholi, 29,635 in Lango 22, 608 more from Teso totaling to 64, 353 claimants in the three sub-regions.
So far, the government has paid 4836 of the registered 16946 claimants in Acholi, spending 43.66 billion shillings in the sub-region for compensation.
A total of 42,024 claimants were registered from the Lango Sub Region, but 12,389 were paid, amounting to 48.73 billion shillings.
The Teso sub-region registered 33,664 claimants, 11,056 have received their compensation, costing the government 65.65 billion shillings.
Over the years, the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development has released 168.31 billion to compensate 20,281 claimants across the three sub-regions.
Meanwhile, 1.18 billion bounced back to the consolidated account due to a mismatch in the bank details of the beneficiaries, as the reports further highlighted.
In the financial year 2021/2022, the government released 49.3 billion of the proposed budget of 50 billion shillings, but 676 million bounced back to the consolidated account.
But the subsequent year, the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs budgeted for 30 billion shillings, which was never released.
Similarly, of the 71.28 billion released for the 2023/2024 financial year, 509 billion bounced back, but such an anomaly was not registered in the financial year 2024/24 with 38.21 billion allocated.
Addressing the concerns, President Museveni noted that while he made the mistake of agreeing to compensate people, his government will be liable to pay for the losses of the wars.
“With war, the answer is, end the war, bring and rehabilitate and that what we were planning but these people went to court and remember that time we were still fighting Sudan because me I was looking for peace and I said, ok, if they are going to court, let’s talk to them that’s why we agreed although I wasn’t convinced that that was the correct way” Museveni stated.
He adds,” In other parts of the World, you can’t compensate for war or earthquake, earthquake is called an act of God…so many things get killed, how can you compensate all of them. If you talk of Uganda alone, by 1979, the whole of Mbarara town was flattened, not a single building remained, Masaka, the same, even Arua some extent, was damaged later”
Seemingly regretting his earlier commitment, Museveni observed that” we have 300,000 skeletons of those who died in Luwero, the government can’t pay for what the war caused ideally”
Museveni said the best approach the government could have taken was to rehabilitate the victims, describing the ongoing compensation as a ‘trial’ marred with irregularities.
But he castigated the courts for complicating the process of obtaining letters of administration for the region, which is yet to come out of the long-standing civil war.
“This poor household must look for 500,000 shillings to obtain a letter of administration that excludes other costs of coming to town and feeding, can they afford this?” Museveni asked.
Between 1987and 2005, northern Uganda lost considerable herds of cattle during the interwar period and the cattle rustlers when President Museveni took over power from a bush war.
-URN
