Uganda police faces task of combating organised crime

• Excluding classified expenditure, for instance, the police this year will spend Ush15.8 billion ($5.4 million) on tear gas and anti riot equipment, despite demonstrations being on the decline.

Uganda’s Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura faces the daunting task of redirecting his troops to combating organised crime and the rampant murders that have spread fear across the country.

The police chief has linked the recent assassinations of Muslim clerics in the capital and the eastern region of Uganda to cells of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a an Islamist rebel group whose main base since the mid 1990s has been eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

A source told The EastAfrican that security agencies were troubled “by the extent to which the ADF has built its cells in the region.”  The cells are mainly in the Busoga region districts of Mayuge, Bugiri and Namayingo.

Initially, the criminal gangs targeted Muslim sheikhs, but in the latest incident just last week, two police guards of High Court Judge Faith Mwondha were killed in the eastern district of Bugiri and their guns taken.

Gen Kayihura, has taken to shuttling between central and eastern Uganda as the criminal gangs run amok. The wave of crime presents a personal dilemma for the police chief after he successfully contained countrywide protests that threatened Uganda’s stability in 2011.

Gen Kayihura heads the best resourced police force in Uganda ever in terms of personnel and funding. In the current budget it was allocated Ush395.2 billion ($136.1 million). But his critics fault the IGP for using a significant chunk of this kitty for political policing, to buy teargas and anti-riot equipment, and to  foot allowances for anti-riot informants, at the expense of normal policing.

Excluding classified expenditure, for instance, the police this year will spend Ush15.8 billion ($5.4 million) on tear gas and anti riot equipment, despite demonstrations being on the decline.

Late December last year, Gen Kayihura camped in Mayuge district, eastern Uganda, and vowed not to leave until the killers of Sheikh Abdul Kadhir Muwaya, gunned down on Christmas Day, were arrested. Days later, the IGP was back in the capital gate-crashing prayers by Muslims who had gathered at Kibuli mosque after another cleric Sheikh Mustafa Bahiiga, the Kampala district amir of the Jamu-i-yyat Dawah al-Salafiyyat was slain.

During the prayers, Gen Kayihura, who has been at the helm of the country’s lead law enforcement institution since 2005, apologised for his force’s failures.

“As a person who is responsible for protecting life, I have failed. I feel a sense of failure that we could not protect him but I am a human being. If you want to crucify me, do so… there must be law and order in this country. Our job is law enforcement; without it we are finished,” he told the mourners in Kampala.

The killing of Justice Mwondha’s guards brings the tally to four gunned down in three months, but in total, since 2012, there have been 10 assassinations — eight of these, Muslim leaders.

“What is clear is the sheikhs were killed by ADF but we need to find the individuals who did it,” Gen Kayihura said in December, claiming that the clerics were slain after they refused to co-operate with ADF.

But while failure to contain this insecurity is a blot on the police’s capacity to detect crime, it also raises other political questions, with critics arguing that the government could use this to declare a state of emergency in the entire region of eastern Uganda in order to delay general elections slated for February 2016.