Sold cows and paid Shs10b in cash for land? You goat to be kidding me! - Daily Monitor

Luwum Street in downtown Kampala is not for the faint-hearted. Young men and women, masters of sleight of hand, are often on hand to relieve careless visitors of their hard-earned treasures. This is often through the offer of incredulously good deals that are almost always too-good-to-be-true, or through the feint of greedy promises: a dying Indian here, a desperate investor there, looking for ball bearings or same such.

It is amidst this cacophony of chaos and purveyors of chance that Margaret Muhanga turned up on December 30, 2013, according to court records and her testimony before Parliament, with Shs10.2 billion in cash.

Your columnist, who is rarely able to rub two millions together, has never seen a billion in cash, let alone 10, so the mind is allowed to wander, the tongue to give the parched lips a consolatory lick, in trying to imagine how such a tidy sum was then carried up six floors, past the Luwum Street 'deal-chasers', to Room 12, Plot 11, office of Tropical General Auctioneers. The cash was to pay for 23 acres of land belonging to Uganda Broadcasting Corporation that was under the hammer.

If such a payment arrangement sounds rather reckless on a street full of hoodlums ready to snatch a mere necklace, Ms Muhanga's revelations about the provenance of the cash – allegedly obtained through the generosity of friends and family as well as the disposal of livestock, to wit cattle and goats – floated forth with the pungent wisp of incredulity, marinated in the fermented jus of impunity.

The issue here isn't the profitability of the livestock business – although one would expect that tax authorities would have a question or two – or whether Ms Muhanga could afford to have such a stash of cash in her house. The issue is why this fraud remains in the public domain more than five years after it was first exposed in these pages, and why the key players have not been brought to book.

Here is the story in summary: UBC management under Paul Kihika started a fire sale of the public broadcaster's prime land. Many benefitted, often irregularly. In the mad rush, fatal mistakes were committed, which later came to haunt the culprits. The High Court found that this particular transaction was flawed and illegal and struck it down, potentially leaving the original buyers, Haba Group, without the land or the money they'd paid against an illegal transaction they couldn't enforce.

None of this is new, or particularly unsurprising, for there is a Luwum Street in every corridor of power or money. However, what should concern us, beyond the number of goats one would need to sell to raise a billion, is how public bodies were used to try and circumvent the course of justice and the court ruling.

An appeal to higher courts to stop the wheels of justice turning. A bogus consent judgement entered into with the connivance of UBC officials to irregularly countermand or amend judicial orders. Eye-popping transactions in the Lands Department whereby the land was transferred to one party at 14:42, a special certificate issued two minutes later, and then the land transferred to yet another party two minutes later.

Such can't happen without the connivance of very senior people in the Lands Office, and if it sounds familiar, it is because it is: in two separate matters involving some of the same players, land was transferred to related parties by the same people in the same manner to pervert the course of justice. (See, for instance, http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/688334-1285448-a2atxmz/index.html)
In fact, we must now confront the reality that has been staring us in the face for many years now; that these frauds must be godfathered from higher levels of government, for the direct and personal benefit of people with the power to stop them and absolutely no desire to do so.

On the grand chessboard of grand corruption in Uganda, many of the 'small people' caught holding the can or making up tales of fancy about walking up flights of stairs to collect pie from the sky are just pawns. Ms Muhanga might be a damn good goat-herder, but we must start to ask; who owns the flock?

Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi.

dkalinaki@ke.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki