Three Ugandan ruling party legislators have been charged with corruption for trying to influence a rights body to inflate its budget, according to a charge-sheet seen by Reuters.
Graft is rampant in the east African country but prosecution of top officials, especially those allied to the country’s long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni and his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, is rare.
The three legislators – Mutembuli, Paul Akamba and Cissy Namujju Dionizia – were charged with corruption late on Wednesday at the High Court in the capital Kampala. According to the charge-sheet, they were accused of attempting to influence the chairperson of the state-funded Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) to inflate the organisation’s 2024/25 (July-June) budget, in return for giving the lawmakers 20% of the inflated budget. “Mutembuli, Akamba and Dionizia … solicited an undue advantage … by asserting that they were able to exert improper influence over the decision-making of the budget committee of parliament of Uganda to increase the UHRC budget,” the charge-sheet said.
The three all pleaded not guilty and were remanded to a maximum security prison.
Asuman Basalirwa, one of the suspects’ lawyers, told the court that the charges could not be “categorised as grave,” and asked for bail.
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