The bickering between the Minister in charge of Investment and the Director General of the Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) is not about to end.
This letter, authored by UIA DG Robert Mukiza, has put Evelyn Anite on the spot for misrepresenting a meeting with the British High Commissioner to Kampala that never was and orchestrating cyber harassment of Dubai Prince Sheikh Mohammed Juma Al Maktoum.
The July 23, 2024 letter is copied to the President’s Principal Private Secretary, the Minister of Finance, the UIA Board Chairman, the Attorney General, and all the UIA staff who received the honorarium payments the minister has directed should be refunded.
Mukiza has disputed the Minister’s June 11, 2024, presentation during a joint UIA Board and Management meeting she chaired, where she reported that she had met the UK High Commissioner Kate Airey, who had pressured her to have the staff refund the honorarium payments.
On June 12, 2024, Anite wrote to the UIA chairman board of directors, Moris Rwakakamba, directing him to force the UIA staff members who received honoraria payments to refund them within 24 hours, which would lead to dismissal.
But Mukiza insists that selected UIA staff had been given extra assignments on the ongoing project of upgrading the Kampala Industrial and Business Park at Namanve when they took over the roles of Owner’s Engineer, whose contract had been terminated.
The UIA staff wrote to the contractor, asking for the account where to deposit the refund.
But in the meantime, Anite took the matter on her social media platforms, where she aggressively posted and updated the public about that matter. It caught the President’s attention, who invited the minister, the board, and the UIA staff who received the honorarium payments for a meeting at the State House. During the meeting, Mukiza described minister Anite as a manipulative, corrupt, and hypocritical leader in the history of mankind and went ahead to inform the president that the minister was just using the honorarium payments as a pretext, but the real motives she wanted him out of office are different.
After the meeting with the president, Anite, filled with rage, went on her X handle and began blasting Mukiza, accusing him of telling lies to the president.
On July 3, 2024, Minister Anite again wrote to Mukiza, officially expressing her disappointment at him for allegedly lying to the President.
Mukiza has since responded to the minister, accusing her of forging all the grounds she had used to try to force the UIA staff to refund the money that was in any case legally paid.
The UIA Director General accuses the Minister of lying that she had personally met with the UK High Commissioner to Uganda, who had directed that the money be refunded. He again accused her of concocting lies that the UKEF, the funder, is the one that put her under pressure to act the way she did.
Mukiza, in the letter, further accuses the Minister of having denied that she called Mohammed Juma Marktoum a conman who is impersonating the Dubai Royal Family.
He put her on the spot by providing evidence of their chat, showing the message from her to him calling the Dubai Prince “a fake investor.”