“Corruption has been a hugely significant issue in the defence sector in Uganda for many years. I will illustrate some of the wider known examples.

There was an Army Council meeting in 1987 during which it was suggested that the government should procure trucks at a cost of US$1 million. However, someone informed the meeting that that the previous year the army had made a similar purchase for US$1 million worth of trucks which had never arrived. The Chief of Military Intelligence in Uganda at the time was asked to investigate, and concluded that there were very senior personalities involved. Not surprisingly, no action was taken.

The next year, there were reports that there were many ghost soldiers on the register – that is, soldiers who appear on army registers, but who do not actually exist.

Also at that time it was suspected that army officers in operational zones were awarding contracts which never purchased anything – it was referred to as ‘supplying air to the army’. There was an investigation ordered, but before the evidence could be presented, some senior army officers colluded and burnt down Army Headquarters. No action was ever taken.”

One of the areas of defence which is particularly susceptible to corruption is that of procurement. The Digest team asked Mwenda if procurement in the Ugandan armed forces had been known to have such problems.

“There have been a number of army purchases which have raised suspicions. In a paper in the Review of African Political Economy I co-authored with Roger Tangri, we discussed corruption in the military in Uganda and focused on several procurements which were problematic. We detailed the purchases of ‘junk helicopters’ and the payment of commissions, for which there was no punishment. The Government has bought machine guns from North Korea that malfunctioned. They purchased about 90 tanks from Bulgaria and then found only 10 tanks were operational – the others were junk. Then there were the MiG jet fighters, which arrived with one wing each and spare parts missing. When they were finally able to fly, it was discovered their bomb-ports were too small and had insufficient capacity.

A more unusual incident concerned bullets which had been manufactured with deficient amounts of gun powder. They were deployed to a battalion to engage the rebels in the North and the battalion was massacred.”

The Ugandan armed forces have been fighting a rebellion in the North for a considerable amount of time, but in the early 1990s there was the potential for disarmament as the armed forces seemed to have defeated the rebellion. Mwenda was critical of how the demobilisation of Uganda did not lead to a reduction in military expenditure.

“Disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) took place over 1994-1996. Since then, Uganda has seen a remobilisation of the army. In 1992, the donors equipping the government of Uganda wanted the army to be reduced from 100,000 to 40,000; it was thought that since the rebellion in the North had been crushed, that defence spending should be reduced and invested as ‘social spending’. The Government understood it to mean that resources should be diverted from paying for soldiers into mechanisation of the defence services. The Government of Uganda went into a crash programme of buying armoured personnel carriers, tanks, artillery pieces, and others, in order to mechanise the army and to create tank divisions and armoured units.

As a result, defence spending in Uganda did not fall. In 1992, when Uganda crushed the rebellion in Northern Uganda, defence spending was at about US$42m. By 1996, it had reached US$88m. By 2000, it was US$110m, and today it is US$265m. Defence spending has become the biggest vehicle through which resources are diverted from defence spending into political activities.”

The discussion of defence expenditures raised the issue of Parliament’s interactions with and oversight of the defence establishment.

“There is no Parliamentary oversight of the defence sector. Parliament has a body called the Public Accounts Committee. The Auditor-General audits all Government Ministries and submits a report to Parliament. The Public Accounts Committee then analyses the Auditor-General’s report before handing it to Parliament. However, the Auditor-General does not audit defence spending, as most of the defence spending in Uganda is classified expenditure which is outside the Auditor-General’s brief. So of course, the greatest theft takes place at the level of classified expenditure.

Parliament finds it very difficult to exercise its oversight prerogatives. The Auditor-General’s office monitors every Minister’s expenditure, which means in practice that the Auditor-General must employ auditors to sit in those Ministries in order to conduct their audit. Those auditors are susceptible to the offer of payments in return for turning a blind eye to the theft taking place. The result is that the Auditor-General’s report is heavily compromised. Once that report has been submitted to the Public Accounts Committee, it can summon any officials of any Ministry; a common practice is for those officials to send money in advance to the members of the Committee to pay them off. The institutions that are mandated to combat corruption in this country have grown to be grossly compromised, and the problem is not a partisan issue, it encompasses all political parties.”

Also crucial to the question of oversight is the role of the office of the Executive. The Digest team asked Mwenda how he thought defence corruption could be approached in environments such as Uganda.

“It is difficult to conceive how the problem of defence corruption may be tackled. As so many figures in senior positions often benefit from defence corruption, the incentives against tackling the problem are large. This can also have a detrimental effect on countries in conflict: when the leadership in Defence Ministries are profiteering from conflict through corruption, they have no incentive to end the conflict, and so both corruption and conflict are self-perpetuating.

  

In terms of the corruption risk in procurement, in Uganda the President appointed a Committee of Inquiry headed by a Judge to investigate the purchase of junk helicopters. The Committee looked at wider issues and other problems, concluding that the institutions that are supposed to procure arms are not functioning.

Arms procurement in countries like Uganda is often controlled by the office of the President. The President negotiates items, quantities and prices, and then the President signs it off. Whilst it may often be the case that the President is a very skilled person, it is unlikely he or she has the knowledge and expertise to be able to carry out every defence procurement. The President’s dominating role in procurement in Uganda has been criticised by the Judiciary for this very reason.”

The Digest asked Mwenda’s thoughts on the issue of conflict or threat of conflict and how this may increase corruption risk.

“Insecurity in Uganda has become an excuse to inflate the defence budget under the cover of fighting the rebellion, but the intention for many may be to steal the money. Let us compare Uganda’s situation to Rwanda’s. There is security in Rwanda: they have an effective Defence Ministry and an effective army. They even have soldiers placed in Darfur. Rwanda’s defence spending is about $40m. Their soldiers wear brand new uniforms and new boots and polished guns. Ugandan soldiers wear rugs and live in small huts which they have to enter very slowly and carefully otherwise the hut will disintegrate. The Minister of Defence of Uganda appeared before Parliament and complained that our soldiers are living in these atrocious conditions. He questioned how a US$250 million budget could fail to purchase decent accommodation and uniforms for the army. The Government has been funding defence reviews of Uganda and pouring money into defence, but it all seems to disappear.

In the army people are complaining that the rebels are better equipped than they are. The army lacks basic equipment: ponchos, pistols, and boots.

There are further issues when international bodies get involved. The problem with the international aid community is that they always finance failure. Even when there is blatant and open corruption, the money continues to flow.”

As a final point, the Digest team and Mwenda returned to the issue of ghost soldiers. Transparency International’s defence sector work on corruption risk has identified ghost soldiers as a key problem in countries in conflict or which are intervening in conflict. Mwenda detailed some of the problems with the ghost soldiers phenomenon in Uganda, and the consequences this had on the ability of the armed forces to provide security to its citizens.

“Uganda was involved in Southern Sudan under the permission of the Sudanese Government; this provided an opportunity to assess the scale of the ‘ghost soldiers’ problem to some extent. Under the Ugandan army establishment, a division is supposed to contain 7,000-8,000 troops; but when sent to Sudan, the actual number was about 2400 troops. In battle, this had disastrous consequences, because once the administrative coy, the sick and the injured are subtracted from the total, the force was only about 1200-strong, far below the figure which should have been present in that particular case.

In 2003, a Commission of Inquiry was appointed to investigate the existence of ghost soldiers on the army register. Estimates of the Ugandan Defence People’s Force in October 2003 suggested there was a total of 29,000 ghost soldiers on the payroll of the Ugandan Army – alternatively, that can be described as three divisions of ghost soldiers. This is indeed a crisis.”