Speaker Rebecca Kadaga has vowed to look into the conduct of business by Lt Col Edith Nakalema’s operatives under State House Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU). Kadaga made this promise while meeting some individual Directors of NAGRIC who supervise MD Charles Lagu whose home Nakalema’s raided at night last Saturday demanding to arrest him for alleged corruption dealings. In the same meeting, Kadaga also heard from senior individual MPs sitting on the agricultural committee which supervises NAGRIC and the entire agricultural sector. Led by Chairperson Janet Akorimoi of NRM, the MPs had previously toured the government stock farms which NAGRIC is responsible for and commended Lagu for doing so much infrastructural work aimed at revamping the farms in such a short time.
The MPs were fascinated seeing so many buildings being constructed by NAGRIC which was known to be an obscure opaque organization until Lagu became its ED/MD in late 2018. Back then, the MPs during the tour promised to use their appropriation power to ensure the Lagu-led NAGRIC gets allocated more money to be able to do even better and more work. The MPs, who fully know the profiles of big people determined to use their proxies to grab government land on these farms, also saluted Lagu for standing firm against agents seeking to manipulate the situation and have these government farms allocated to private investors to the detriment of the people of Uganda.
During the engagement at the Speaker’s chambers earlier in the week, some of these individual legislators expressed anger and consternation that one of the people they had previously been told was menacingly determined to grab government land in the Nshara ranch was captured on the Daily Monitor video featuring prominently among those that stormed Lagu’s upcountry home to humiliate him during the last Saturday arrest. The MPs considered this to be extreme conflict of interest.
During the same interface, Kadaga told the NAGRIC Directors she was chatting with that this is a war she will fight because those pursuing after Lagu are actually working with her other foes to politically humiliate her because the Kasolwe government stock farm, which is one of those Lagu is being investigated for reviving and jealously protecting against land grabbers, is in Kamuli district which she represents as woman MP. Kadaga, who considered previous NAGRIC top leadership to be inept because they merely looked on as Kasolwe farm wasted away, has publicly been very supportive of the current Lagu administration at the Entebbe-based NAGRIC.
She has several times driven to Kasolwe with journalists and expressed gratitude for the good work being done there. Lagu has reconstructed and expanded Kasolwe infrastructure with an aim of boosting its breeding capacity to support livestock farming for the entire Busoga Sub region and this is something the very supportive Speaker is very excited about. She has been to Kasolwe several times and spoken to journalists praising Lagu for the high quality of work being done there.
Yet it’s the same project that the Nakalema team is scrutinizing Lagu for claiming he has delivered shoddy work. Kadaga assured the NAGRIC Directors, who equally consider Lagu to be a star performer, she is keenly interested and closely following how the very reformative and incorruptible NAGRIC ED is being treated. Gratefully Lagu, whose dramatic arrest equally intrigued Gen Salim Saleh whose OWC has closely been working with him to boost livestock farming in the country, will be back on Court for his bail application on Tuesday 5th May. And his defense lawyer is none other than the very able McDusman Kabega who has the reputation of being Kampala’s contemporary best defense lawyer.
The MPs from West Nile have equally come out very vehemently to defend their brother Dr. Charles Lagu calling on the President to politically intervene and neutralize the Mafia actors working to finish him off. The MPs argued at their news conference that they have no problem with 44-year-old Lagu being jailed or investigated but the process should be fair and free of extreme biases like what manifested in the Daily Monitor video whereby one of the people whose private acquisition of NAGRIC land at Nshara the youthful ED has been battling, with extreme impunity, participated in his arrest.
The West Nile MPs considered that to be very improper and evidence that the incorruptible Lagu was merely being persecuted for his strong stand against potential land grabbers menacingly looking at these very government farms which are home to hundreds of square miles scattered in different parts of the country. The MPs are also wondering why the same government now persecuting Lagu didn’t do anything for him late last year when he went into hiding fleeing land-grabbing Mafia actors that wanted to kill him. According to State-owned New Vision, Dr. Lagu reported to security and shared even phone numbers of people that were calling issuing threats of job loss, arrest and assassination (unless he acquiesced to their land-grabbing appetite) but he didn’t get adequate help from law enforcement agencies.
As all this was happening, the Gen Katumba Wamala-led Works Ministry engineers outed their much-awaited investigative (audit) report on the quality of work done at Kasolwe and other government stock farms whose operational capacity the very innovative Lagu has been renovating, revamping and expanding. The technical audit report shows there was no financial loss to GoU. Neither was there any shoddy work done.
This is a major blow to the invisible hand behind Lagu’s persecution because the technical opinion of these government engineers is of critical importance for the evidence that would be required to successfully sustain any criminal prosecution and negative publicity campaign aimed at publicly demonizing and discrediting the ED and depriving him of any legitimacy to lead a government agency like NAGRIC.
Credit: mulengeranews.com
