KAMPALA — President Museveni has appointed his senior advisor anti-corruption, Col Edith Nakalema to head the newly created State House Investors Protectorate Unit.
Nakalema, the former head of the Anti Corruption Unit in the State House, is among the senior UPDF officers who were passed out recently by the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, after completing a one-year training course at the newly-established National Defence College in Jinja.
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Museveni recently set up a special unit under his office to handle investor complaints.
The President said the investors will use this unit, now under Col. Nakalema, to report anyone who asks them for a bribe or tries to delay the process of decision-making.
Museveni says that some members of the political class and technocrats alike in the country are found of conning investors in terms of bribes, in the guise of quickening their efforts of setting up factories which he claims to be slowing down the country’s economic growth.
His decision to formulate this unit resulted from complaints raised by the Labor and Gender Affairs minister, Betty Amongi who claimed that, corruption tendencies by largely public officials have overtime frustrated investors from setting up their preferable business enterprises in the country.
Amongi argued that most public officials are exhibiting poor work ethics by milking heavy bribes from investors, during their quest to explore the different investment protocols, hence frustrating them from fully exploiting the available opportunities in the country’s under exploited sectors like mining, agriculture, tourism among others for fear of further manipulation by office bearers.
In his response, Museveni noted that such deliberate corruption tendencies orchestrated by office bearers at the different levels delay decision making on the viable investors’ plans, frustrate them and escalate the costs of setting up large scale business enterprises, forcing most of them to search out for investment options in other countries with limited bureaucratic tendencies.
Museveni says that, his office has been furnished with different reports concerning corrupt officials, comprising of politicians and some enforcement teams within the Uganda Revenue Authority – URA, whom he faults of impounding imports from unsuspecting investors, before forcing them to pay bribes or risk losing their goods to auctioning.
