I was recently prompted to re-read Isaac Ssemakadde’s narrative of events —published in The CEO Magazine — where he expressed displeasure over this seemingly good judgment that orders Basajjabalaba to refund the money to the public purse.
Ssemakadde’s contention is with the court not ordering four implicated banks [UBA, Orient Bank, Bank of Baroda and Tropical Bank], and Governor Tumusiime-Mutebile, to be the ones charged with recovering the money, not the Attorney General. Or the banks be ordered to refund as they clearly abused the law.
Dear reader, I need to briefly retell this story to bring you up to speed: while fighting blood and tears to be compensated for the so-called cancellation, Basajjabalaba did so much (including carrying “a forged court order,” and greasing many palms), but found many, many unmovable obstacles.
Semakadde narrates that public officials concerned in this matter “from former Attorney General Peter Nyombi (RIP), former URA Commissioner General Allen Kagina, former High Court Registrar John Eudes Keitirima, Auditor General John Muwanga, and ministry of Finance Permanent Secretary and Secretary to the Treasury Keith Muhakanizi all stood their ground [strangely for me] that the Ugandan public did not owe bwana Basajjabalaba a single dime.
But that was before Basajjabalaba cracked the puzzle: Bank of Uganda Governor Prof Tumusiime-Mutebile, and Uganda’s miniature shady commercial banks. In a period of just one year, at various intervals between June 2010 and June 2011, through his Haba Group (U) Ltd, Basajjabalaba applied for and received a series of short-term loans including $1m from Bank of Baroda, $10m from Orient Bank Ltd, $10m from Tropical Bank Ltd, and $19.5m from United Bank of Africa.
Neither of these banks cared to do any due diligence as required by law but, rather, relied on something called “a letter of comfort” that Governor Tumusiime-Mutebile lavishly issued “as a guarantee that BoU would repay each bank’s loan plus interest and attendant costs.”
As would be expected, Haba Group defaulted on all those loans, “but no effort was taken by their bankers to recover the loans by foreclosure in any civil suit or otherwise. Instead, each bank simply invoked its BoU guarantee(s) and was swiftly repaid out of public funds.”
By a not-too-long stretch – just one year – Basajjabalaba had stolen Shs 170bn from Ugandans. And this is not me passing the verdict but, rather, the Constitutional court of Uganda did so on March 24, 2020.
Why am I retelling this story? Different from Isaac Ssemakadde’s powerful contention, I want to ask a related, perhaps, non-legal question: whose employee is Hassan Basajjabalaba? Because, what is missing in the legalese above is the question on the highway to Governor Mutebile’s office, the ease and criterion with which “letters of comfort” are issued. Surely, many Kampala businessmen would love to exploit this highroad.
But the question of who employs our tycoons is a big one for me. Kampala recalls the contentions over the Nakivubo market – and the tycoon who finally won the deal to redevelop the market, brother Hamis Kiggundu.
On February 27, 2017, the over 10,000 vendors of Parkyard Market, woke up to a demolished market with heavy police presence. In stories filed by URN, the demolition started at midnight because on the following day, Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago had a scheduled court hearing for an application to stop the demolition. By the time court sat at 9am, the defendant would argue that the application had been overtaken by events!
By then, politician Beti Kamya was minister for Kampala, and she personally defended and oversaw the demolition. Her passion was both overwhelming as was curious: why would a Kampala politician obsess with a single little-known businessman over an entire electorate? Surely there was more.
This was no common young businessman. Had he not been seen earlier in photoshoots with Mr Museveni brandishing development plans?!
I will end with one more story. This is personal as is painful. We were still mourning Hajji BMK when news broke that his most renowned asset, Hotel Africana, did not actually belong to him. How could that be possible? Started as a rumour in the gossip sections of social media, the story soon became mainstream.
A local tabloid with quite some reputation would write that the deceased had left the hotels in the hands of Mrs Susan Muhwezi, the wife to Afande Major Gen Jim Muhwezi.
Dear reader, you should have seen my confusion upon this news. The late Hajji BMK was a man with a renowned business profile in Uganda and beyond. How was this possible? While trying to make head and tail of this Hajji BMK story, the stories I have told above returned to confuse me even more.
Surely Hajji BMK was no Hamis Kiggundu nor Hassan Basajjabalaba. What is true is that we have “merchants with a little more cash” than the rest of the country erroneously described as tycoons. In truth, tycoons have to be involved in the major cash cows in the country.
If we have no one tycoon in coffee trade, gold trade, oil drilling or other of our cash-cows, then everyone else is a merchant, a front, or employees. We need to find their bosses.
yusufkajura@gmail.com
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.