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Ex-Trade ministry PS Geraldine Ssali has demonstrably been through a lot including being forced out of her job and being controversially prosecuted.
What began as investigations into the circumstances under which she rejected the very expensive rental deal at Kingdom Hotel Kampala as opposed to renovating Farmers House, which was considered best option because the same premises had been home of the cooperators since the 1960s, was subsequently escalated to billions that leaders ate and shared out and thereby disrupting the GoU’s original objective which was to compensate cooperatives for the property and assets lost and looted during the wars Uganda had in the 1970s and 1980s.
Geraldine Ssali, who prioritized many compensations including Masaka Catholic Church-affiliated Bwavu Mpologooma’s Ugx2.7bn, ended up being scapegoated and made the sacrificial lamb. This point has since been made by the leadership of Uganda Cooperative Alliance.
Last Wednesday, the UCA’s public statement signed off by their board chairman Johnas Tweyambe was published in the two leading national daily newspapers. The statement makes it clear that Ssali did nothing wrong effecting Bwavu’s Ugx2.7bn which was a small fraction out of the defunct entity’s verified claim of Ugx9.8bn.
The cooperators in their media statement described the payment as justified because Bwavu wasn’t a ghost cooperative as it had previously been portrayed in the media as Msgr Dominic Ssengooba, Fr. Deusdedit Luyimbazi and Ally Ssali are it’s disclosed and well verified signatories. The cooperative’s assets were stripped and taken over by the Obote I government as it operationalized it’s move to the left policy of the late 1960s.
The statement shows that, having suffered all this injustice, Bwavu surviving cooperators for 53 years pushed for their compensation to no avail until much later on when President Museveni considered them on humanitarian grounds. That it only happened that compensation moment fell at the time Geraldine Ssali was the PS at the Ministry.
Tweyambe’s media statement, motivated by desire to set the record straight while absolving Geraldine Ssali who they believe did nothing wrong, also referred to the 17th January letter which Bwavu survivors and the Masaka Catholic church leadership wrote officially thanking the President for considering them on humanitarian grounds and the PS for promptly acting as instructed.
In the same letter, the Bwavu stakeholders reminded the President about their compensation balance which they controversially put at Ugx110bn.
The statement also thanks Bwavu survivors for utilizing the compensation money, which they topped up to become Ugx4.5bn, to purchase value addition equipment from Vietnam with a purpose of going into larger scale coffee processing and exportation. That the equipment was imported but for 8 months remained uncleared by URA at a warehouse in Namanve from where it accumulated demurrage. That the equipment now lies idle at Bukoloto in Kayunga under the control of East Mengo Cooperative Union after narrowly being saved from being auctioned.
“With such readily available evidence, we are concerned that the PS is facing charges of stealing funds whereas not,” the statement reads in part. The authors demand that the entire evidence being advanced against Geraldine Ssali gets reviewed with a view to establish her innocence because, as far as they are concerned, no culpability can ever be sustained or established against Geraldine Ssali relating to the disbursement of cooperatives compensation funds.
Instead, they want her to be acknowledged for the tremendous role she played towards the revitalization of the cooperatives in Uganda. They demand objective cleaning up of the cooperatives sub sector so that all corporate governance challenges identifiable can be resolved and fixed once and for all.
Formed in 1961, the UCA is the apex body for all registered cooperatives in Uganda and it’s charged with advising the GoU on all matters relating to policy formulation relating to the cooperatives sub sector. The statement shows that the ill-conceived criminal prosecution of Geraldine Ssali negatively impacts on the revitalization process of the cooperatives movement.
They thanked the president for initially reversing Ssali’s interdiction because her decision to renovate Farmers House as opposed to spending billions renting at Kingdom Hotel Kampala saved the taxpayers’ billions and qualified her for a medal as opposed to being sanctioned.
They say that Farmers House has a lot of sentimental attachment for millions of cooperators having been their home for the last 61 years, besides being the proposed home for the yet-to-be revamped Cooperatives Bank.
They raise a red flag on the fact that when charges relating to Farmers House renovation proved unsustainable, Geraldine Ssali’s pursuers jumped on cooperatives compensation through which political leaders, including MPs, fraudulently shared out the hundreds of billions of shillings.
The statement also shows that the cooperatives compensation program commenced in 2006 under the Justice Ministry and was only transferred to Trade in 2014 long before Geraldine Ssali became PS there. That some of the challenges that impended the compensation process related to governance problems, disagreements between lawyers and compensation recipients or beneficiaries and can as such not appropriately be blamed on Geraldine Ssali. That the verification committees which looked into compensation claims were put in place long before Ssali became PS and therefore problems relating to their failure to properly verify claims can’t be blamed on her.
The UCA statement also describes Geraldine Ssali as a victim of persecution and witch-hunt by the mighty because, whereas she was formally charged in relation to the Buyaka Cooperative Union, in the media she was demonized to have eaten and stolen money in relation to Bwavu Mpologoma.
To the UCA chairman, all this is evidence of targeted witch-hunt and persecution. That her pursuers avoided charging her over Bwavu Mpologoma because the facts on paper were such that nothing could be sustained against her in a court of law and a holding charge of some sort had to be found under the guise of Buyaka.
Away from the much-publicized exoneration by UCA, Geradine Ssali was also recently unintentionally vindicated on another least expected front. On 24th, the attorney general’s chambers authored a legal opinion making it clear that once the accounting officer or PS at Trade has paid out the money as guided through the verification committee, what the beneficiaries do with the money is none of his or her business.
The AG letter was a response to the new Trade PS who was seeking to be advised on how to resolve disagreements among members of Rwampara ranching cooperative society Ltd who quarrelled and failed to agree on how to share out their compensation money.
The PS has been advised by the AG to just ignore and concentrate on his other core work because resolving such disputes is none of his business. Ironically, during Geraldine Ssali’s time such guidance was sought in writing but the AG chambers remained silent and never guided the former PS on how to proceed when confronted with such circumstances or cases.
