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Up to his retirement in December 2024, Emmanuel Bakwega had served out as one of the very powerful Directors from the technical wing at the Parliament of Uganda. He powerfully served under Speakers Edward Kiwanuka Sekandi, Rebecca Kadaga, Jacob Oulanyah and Anita Among who came after. He belongs to the generation of powerful technocrats at Parliament with the likes of Chris Kaija, Paul Gamusi Wabwire and Okello Obabalu being some of his peers.
However, Bakwega is on the verge of bouncing back in an even greater capacity to head the Parliamentary Service in the capacity of Clerk to Parliament, which makes him the accounting officer.
There is growing consensus that there is need to clean up and effect a complete purge at the Legislature whose former head Anita Among has since been thrown under the bus and continues to be investigated by the IGG along with several technical officers who served under her.
Convinced that there will soon be a vacuum at the accounting officer level, should the IGG investigations end into prosecution of several officials, a group of powerful lobbyists sheltering under ex-Premiers Amama Mbabazi and Ruhakana Rugunda have embarked on intensive lobbying to get the President appoint their man Bakwega and contract him to serve as the new Clerk to Parliament under new Speaker Oboth-Oboth.
He is being marketed as a man with immense experience on how to run Parliament having served and grown through the ranks under Aeneas Tandekwire who served as Clerk to Parliament from 1989 all the way to late 2011. At the height of his career, Bakwega (now in his early 70s) had grown to the level of serving as Director Clerks, a very powerful role which enabled him to do a lot of administrative work including coordinating the allocation of financial and human resources to facilitate and support Committees of Parliament to do their work. The very rich Mukiga pensioner these days lives happily at his retirement home on Mutungo hill in Kampala’s Nakawa Division.
Those pressurizing Gen Museveni to consider recalling him to become Clerk to Parliament on contract assert that there is need to have a person of that pedigree to support the implementation of sweeping human resource and financial management reforms which the new Speaker Oboth-Oboth intends to occasion in his first five years to redeem the image of the Legislature which had gotten so much bruised under the very ruinous tenure of Anita Among. The pro-Bakwega lobbyists, as of beginning of this week, were also considering leveraging Odrek Rwabwogo’s connections to amplify their case and get the President issue a blue letter decreeing his recall and posting to serve as the new Clerk to Parliament.
However, knowledgeable sources say that Gen Museveni has been reluctant after an intelligence dossier, aimed at assessing the suitability of Bakwega’s posting, highlighted some of the controversies that his name was synonymous with during his service as an employee of the Parliamentary Commission.
The dossier, which has since caused the President to become less inclined to acquiesce to Bakwega’s recall, among other things referred to the 2022 Dubai Expo-related circumstances (concerning an expenditure of Shs5bn) which caused then Speaker Anita Among to sanction him.
Yet, as the President’s dossier indicates, Anita Among wasn’t the only head of the Parliamentary Commission who found Bakwega problematic and even had him redeployed to some less lucrative roles. Much earlier on, Rebecca Kadaga (considered by many to have been a more reasonable Speaker) had also registered her displeasure in Bakwega’s way of doing things and exercised her powers, as head of the Parliamentary Commission, to have him reprimanded.
On 22nd March 2021, the President has been reminded that, Kadaga (in writing) raised a red flag rebuking Bakwega’s handling of what she described as “Program 2 & Committee Budget.”
“Several Committee Chairpersons and members have expressed grave concerns about management of Program 2 and Committee Budgets,” Kadaga wrote in her one-page letter to Ms Jane Kibirige who as of that time was serving as the Clerk to Parliament before being replaced with Adolf Mwesige months later.
“You are hereby directed to cause handover of management of the above budget from Mr. Bakwega Emmanuel, the Director Department of Clerks to Mr. PG Wabwire, Deputy Clerk legislative services with immediate effect. Your handover report should include among others a summary of budget performance report for Program 2 and Committee budgets for the period from 1st July 2020 to date.”
The same Bakwega had previously been sidelined from the position of Director Clerks in favor of Ignatius Kasirye after several Committee Chairpersons had indicated being uncomfortable having him in that role.
The intelligence dossier indicates to the President that the proposed recalling and redeployment of such a person into such a sensitive role as Clerk to Parliament, moreover at this point in time, won’t create good optics for the management reforms Gen MK would like the new Speaker Oboth-Oboth to spearhead at the legislative arm of government.
Yet that isn’t all. The same dossier also makes reference to the August 2019 comprehensive report that the then IGG Irene Mulyagonja authored for the Parliamentary Commission. The IGG report was titled “Alleged Corruption Practices by Two Directors of Parliament of Uganda” who were named as Emmanuel Bakwega and one other one. It was referenced HQT/36/6/2017.
Mulyagonja found that Bakwega, a very proud Mukiga from South Western Uganda, had along with another director received Shs100m as facilitation to travel to Kigali and UK for training between December 2015 and June 2016 but the officer(s) never attended the trainings. Another gentleman who was Deputy Clerk to Parliament in charge of Parliamentary Affairs was equally implicated in the ombudsman report.
The seminar Bakwega was facilitated for but never attended, according to the IGG report, was themed “Beyond Aid: Innovative Governance, Financing & Partnership for post 2015 Agenda.” Venue was Wilton Park in June 2016.
The IGG contacted the organizers through the British High Commission in Kampala and it was confirmed the training took place but Bakwega never attended. The IGG also established that the receipts, invoices and accreditation letters which the two officials had submitted to her office weren’t authentic, after the organizers denied ever issuing such.
Mulyagonja informed the Parliamentary Commission in her voluminous report that all the accountability documents relating to that training, that had been submitted to her office, hadn’t been issued by the training organizers. “Therefore, the investigation concluded that the sum of Ugx99,235,200 advanced to the two officials [Emmanuel Bakwega & another] was not used for the intended purpose and was misappropriated or embezzled.”
The IGG also made very scandalizing findings regarding Bakwega’s involvement in the “3rd EALA meeting in Kigali-Rwanda in 2015” and made reference to Mr. Madete Kenneth, the Clerk to the EALA Parliament. In the same report, the IGG exonerated Director Information & Communications Chris Obore regarding the procurement of the professional heavy duty video camera equipment, a controversial procurement that involved M/s MTA Computers Ltd.
As recommended by the IGG, Emmanuel Bakwega serving as Director of Clerks refunded Shs48,139,600 as his other fellow big man (serving as Deputy Clerk Parliamentary Affairs) also coughed Shs51,095,600 within three months of the IGG report coming out.
“This is money they received to undertake training in the UK, which they did not do but accounted for fraudulently. The money should be refunded on the Inspectorate of Government Asset Recovery Account number 003030088000007 in Bank of Uganda, failure of which the duo shall be prosecuted.”
The IGG also directed Jane Kibirige, then Clerk to Parliament, to ‘submit Mr. Emmanuel Bakwega to the Parliamentary Commission for appropriate disciplinary action for receiving funds to attend training abroad, which [he] did not attend but fraudulently accounted for the money.’
However, the recommended disciplinary sanctioning wasn’t done as severely as the IGG had recommended because some of the members of the Parliamentary Commission feared that a much squeezed Bakwega would implode and revenge by spilling even more scandalizing secrets relating to the expenditure of the $500,000 for the procurement of the Chogm Mobile Vehicle, that was never delivered.
As he contends with the immense pressure strong lobbyists have put him under, Gen Museveni is reportedly reflecting on all the above referenced anomalous past regarding Mr. Emmanuel Bakwega’s track record of service while serving as a big man at Uganda’s Legislature to which powerful lobbyists want him to be deployed back this time in an even a more powerful position of Clerk to Parliament.
