Tabu Butagira
7 November 2009
The fight between Energy minister Eng. Hillary Onek and permanent secretary Mr Fredrick Kabagambe-Kaliisa is headed to President Museveni, it emerged yesterday.
Eng. Onek told Saturday Monitor that he intends to seek guidance from the President after Mr Kabagambe-Kaliisa criticised the minister's work methods and the findings of a committee appointed by the minister to investigate the cause of high electricity tariffs in the country.
The minister confirmed that he had received a copy of Mr Kabagambe-Kaliisa's report which is very critical of one produced in September by a committee headed by Gen. Salim Saleh aka Caleb Akandwanaho.
Eng. Onek said his efforts to reduce power tariffs in the country are being hindered by a "terrible gang" of entrenched interest groups.
"I need prayers; they are terrible!" Eng. Onek said, suggesting his efforts to unbundle an "entrenched corruption network" had put him at crossroads.
"Those [Kabagambe-Kaliisa's views] are deliberate lies to discredit the report with a calculated intention to make the public have a wrong view," the minister told this newspaper. "To me that's indiscipline. I am going to find from the right [appointing] authority if that's the right way for a senior civil servant to behave."
The minister said he was "surprised" by the contents of Mr Kabagambe-Kaliisa's dossier which disputes findings by the Saleh Committee that manipulation and collusion by government and private sector officials in the energy industry were costing the government more than Shs300 billion each year and contributing to one of the highest electricity tariffs in the world.
Report dismissed
In a report written on behalf of 'stakeholders' in the energy industry, Mr Kabagambe-Kaliisa says that Gen. Saleh's committee sidelined resourceful technocrats and in some instances "intentionally distorted" facts volunteered by stakeholders.
"The conclusions and recommendations in the report, therefore, are not supported by facts on the ground but rather based on distorted [reality] and wrong assumptions," he wrote.
In his report, Mr Kabagambe-Kaliisa insinuated that some of the members of the Saleh Committee were potentially guilty of conflict of interest because of their interests in a company that is supposed to supply power to the national grid later this year.
The permanent secretary said an independent investigation ought to be carried out to establish why the Saleh Report singles out Invespro (U) Ltd., a company contracted to supply power to the government, and whether any of the committee members have ties to the company.
Well-placed sources in the energy industry told Saturday Monitor that at least one of the members of the Saleh Committee "has very strong interests" in Invespro which is supposed to set up a Heavy Fuel Oil plant in Jinja.
The Saleh report is critical of a decision to award Invespro a three-year concession instead of the eight-year deal the firm had asked for - pressure that Mr Kabagambe-Kaliisa says could suggest a conflict of interest.
"In the power supply chain, the Invespro HFO plant is supposed to come in to replace the Kiira thermal plan," the PS wrote. "The site seems to have very limited or no activity at all... the owners of Invespro have to move very fast to ensure that the country does not slide back into darkness."
Our efforts to establish the directors of Invespro were futile as the company's file has since gone missing at the Registrar of Companies.
Eng. Frank Ssebowa who heads the Electricity Regulatory Authority, told Saturday Monitor that Invespro has been licensed to produce 50 mega watts of electricity using a heavy-fuel oil thermal power plant. He however, said that none of the Saleh Committee members was listed as a proprietor in the documents submitted by Invespro last year.
The Saleh committe
The Saleh Committee comprised Mr Muyanja Mbabaali, former Bank of Uganda Secretary Dr Muhammad Sserunjogi, former MP Jacob Oulanya, retired central Bank deputy governor Perez Bukumunhe and Mr Robert Segonja, co-opted as consumers' representative.
These officials, said Minister Onek, are all high achievers in society, clean and patriotic citizens whose judgments would not be blurred by vested stakes.
"The gangs who were benefiting from whatever happened [in the energy sector scandal] are the ones saying they have been sidelined. The information used in compiling the report was given by technocrats and I have not invented the report," said Eng. Onek.
Without naming names, Eng. Onek said yesterday that "a gang of rogues", including officials from his ministry, have been holding secret night meeting to discredit the report already adopted by cabinet. This, he said, was a trick to circumvent implementation of the report recommendations.
Eng. Kabagambe-Kaliisa was not available for comment yesterday. Details of the meeting were not readily available but the matter now appears set to drag in President Museveni who must choose between upholding the findings of the Saleh Committee chaired by his younger brother, or side with the technocrats in the energy ministry.
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