It is now five years since the once powerful Inspector General of Police was removed from office, incarcerated, thrown out of the system with his entire team and confined in his countryside home in Kashagama, Lyantonde District.
It has been established that Gen. Kale Kayihura and his powerful team of (Nickson Agasirwe, Herbert Muhangi and Richard Ndaboine) were betrayed and sacrificed by their colleagues due to greed, intrigue and internal bickering. In today’s intelligence briefing, we reveal the role played by Mohamood Masaba Mutenyo aka Bicupuli and his driver Abdallah Sowedi in the downfall of the UPDF’s four-star General.
The latest intelligence reveals that Kayihura met Masaba through the State House channels after the latter fabricated a report alleging that the former Prime Minister John Patrick Amama Mbabazi gave him money to procure 4000 Toyota Premios from Kampala Modernity Bond to coordinate his political activities across the country. Masaba and his driver used their ways to ‘leak’ the information to the president. Due to too much pressure, the president reportedly linked Masaba to the then IGP to handle the situation. This was an opportunity for Masaba to enrich himself. Whenever he ran out of cash, he would access Kayihura’s office and unlike other people who were refrained from entering the IGP’s office with their cellular phones, Masaba freely entered with his phones. On several occasions, he threatened to revert to the president and let him know that there was not enough facilitation from police to coordinate his activities. This would throw Kayihura in utter panic and millions would be mobilized to facilitate the man from the Bamasaaba land.
This peddling of lies in the political situation became a thriving business and since Sowedi’s supervisor SCP Geoffrey Musana had lost his office, the former switched to driving Masaba. This became an opportunity for Sowedi to access police secrets which Masaba would discuss freely with the then IGP in order to streamline the political strategies.
However, in the background Sowedi was determined to continuously build his blackmail strategy against the former IGP. It was not until when Sowedi was captured on camera by the staff of Col. Herbert Nabimanya at the State House quarter guard that he realized some of his delivered reports were going back to police. Sowedi claimed that he did this out of frustration due to his failure to be regularized in the police force despite serving for a long time. He felt that he was deprived of earning handsomely which made it very difficult to sustain the family needs. The situation got out of hand when some senior police officers reportedly took the advantage of his financial constraints and started messing up with his wife Annet Kadyoli who is also a police officer attached to Ministry of Labour under VIPPU, a section of personnel who safeguard VIPs who are high risk principals usually high ranking public officials or security officers.
Out of frustration, Sowedi implicated and turned swords against some senior police officers who included Commissioners Laban Muhabwa (retired) and Herman Owomugisha. At some point, Sowedi reached a level where he could not control his wife. Under the VIPPU section, she was earlier deployed at Uganda Revenue Authority (URA). The situation totally ran out of hand since she started dining with URA rich men including one Ambrose Pule who even took up the education and medical upkeep of her children. When the suspicion escalated, Sowedi seized the medical cards of his children that indicated Pule as their father. All this piled a lot of frustration on Sowedi and matters became worse months ago when Gen. Kayihura was cleared of his charges leading his people to be retained in police. At the same time, Sowedi, a man who for a long time had postured as an Assistant Superintendent of Police was sent to Kabalye for training so as to regularize his position in police as a police constable (SPC). Little did he know that this was a systematic move to make him lose his stance at the training. He was put in the same dormitory with the people he had all along blacklisted and reported to various offices as criminals. This forced him to abandon the course and as we write this, he has been allocated a police truck on a special assignment of delivering firewood. He was recently overheard bragging that it’s time for him to quit the police docket and join higher ladders following his contacts with top echelons in the country.
Sowedi’s life at police
Sowedi, a renowned critic of the former IGP recently penned a missive showing his experience at police under the Kale’s leadership and it has since leaked to the media as reproduced verbatim hereunder. In the missive, Sowedi clearly indicates that he has been sidelined but forgot that he is not a trained police officer. In 2007, he started a revenge campaign that saw him make several reports on lifestyle, office issues against the entire team that was formerly supervised by Nickson Agasirwe.
Despite writing hate reports against the former IGP and his team, some of which reached Kale’s confidant David Gonyi, nothing was done. Although Sowedi thought that his reports would earn him access to police nominal rolls without going through the process of recruitment and training, things did not work his way. As a driver to the former Deputy CID Director, Geoffrey Musana, he thought it was easier for him to enter the police not knowing that his boss was very close to the Kayihura team due to the nature of work which directly fed into CID directorate. On learning this, he turned guns to his immediate supervisor who eventually became a victim in the murders of the Muslim clerics. Sowedi was raised under the hands of an Islamic school in Mbale and with that background it was easier for him to manipulate the Muslim community, the fact that he was always by the side of the deputy CID Director. They raised allegations against the deputy CID director which later saw SCP Musana being removed from CID. Eventually, Sowedi made it look like the Kayihura team knew what was happening with the killings of Muslim clerics and fabricated reports which he personally delivered to the State House quarter guard.
Sowedi’s retrieved missive verbatim
“It was during the CHOGM deployment when I was deployed at Katonga Bridge on Masaka road by Nickson Agasiirwe, the then special operations Commander under Kale.
This was an insult to me. One wonders how I could be deployed in Katonga when the Queen was not even going to use that part of the country.
That marked my hatred for the entire police leadership and I vowed to fight and undermine Nickson until when God made it, a prayer well Answered.
I moved to whoever wanted to hear and exposed the rot which was in the police under the blue-eyed boys. Sometimes I wonder why Ugandans continue to believe that Kale helped the police.
He mismanaged public funds in an effort to sustain intelligence units………,” the missive reads in part.
“I recall the Day I made a report to the president and I knew it was going to reach but it hit my minds when the then Director of Intelligence Col. Nabimanya and team took my photo at the quarter guard in Entebbe and before I could return to Kampala, General Kale and Team had my face and report.
This endangered and compromised my personal Security but still I survived under hardships.
My life at the police changed to worse and deployments became a big challenge.
I kept surviving on handouts from friends like Mayor Masaba currently representing Mbale Industrial Area Division.
Masaba knew how to play on IGP’s physiology as he was connected to Mbabazi and Kale wanted to ensure the two don’t remain friends.
Masaba exposed Mbabazi political schemes to the President and that’s how he became close to the IGP.
In fact, even at the time when the IGP was arrested by the military, I was at Kashagama where I had driven Masaba to meet Gen. Kale and a few days later after his arrest he was charged at the military court in Kampala, Uganda, on August 24, 2018. Uganda’s former police chief was released on bail after 76 days in military custody on charges of failure to protect war materials and aiding and abetting kidnaps. We saw all these issues related to the charges a long time ago but the intelligence was on his payroll. My suffering at police is entirely due to hatred from Nickson and team………,” the missive goes on.