Ugandan President Gen Yoweri Kaguta Tibuhaburwa Museveni has made more shocking revelations on the Ugandan troops under the ATMIS mission in Somalia following a deadly attack on the UPDF Buulo-Mareer base by the Al-Shabaab militants.
Operational since 2008, the Forward Operational Base (FOB) in Buulo-Mareer was attacked on Friday by terrorists estimated to have been 800 in number. A number of Ugandan soldiers were reportedly killed while several others are also said to have been captured alive.
Gen Museveni, the Commander in Chief (CiC) of the country’s armed forces, has blamed the attack, which is said to have been so devastating, on mistakes made on the side of the UPDF officers and commanders.
The president, aged 78 and a former bush war commander himself, has castigated the base commanders and the senior officers in charge of the ATMIS mission for the Ugandan base for being corrupt and for sending incompetent, poorly trained and inexperienced sons of the land to a foreign country for a serious assignment that requires thorough training and experience.
The centre of Museveni’s accusations comprises money and corruption. Addressing Members of Parliament (MPs) from his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party at the National Leadership Institute (Nali) Kyankwanzi, Gen Museveni openly accused the commanders of corruption.
The legislators will spend 10 days at the institute discussing the Parish Development Model. In his speech on Sunday, May 28, 2023, the president and NRM National Chairman told MPs to avoid debts, to stop shouldering their constituents’ burdens and to stop blocking his proposals in Parliament.
The president also briefed the lawmakers on the corruption within the command of the national army, making it clear that he was unhappy with commanders who lack the bush war and immediate post-war National Resistance Army (NRA) ideology and spirit of love for one’s country.
The general from Rwakitura revealed that because of wanting their bodyguards and personal assistants partake of the juicy allowances on the juicy UN-funded mission in Somalia, the officers responsible had gone ahead to include incompetent soldiers and fresh recruits on the list of those to be deployed in the war-ravaged Somalia.
“One of the factors in that incident will be, again, corruption by some of these new players in the army who do not have the NRA spirit of patriotism,” said Museveni.
“Somebody told me that somebody may get about Shs38m in a year when they are deployed there. Some of the people who organize they pick these bodyguards, personal assistants – I don’t know what – they put their names there to create sort of adhoc groups made of bodyguards, made of what, recruits – instead of having an integral units.”
It should be remembered that a bodyguard who shot a Museveni minister dead weeks ago was new on the job because some of the minister’s bodyguards had been sent on a mission abroad. (See Details Here and There).
Meanwhile, Gen Museveni has already revealed that the UPDF soldiers in Somalia had panicked during the Al-Shabaab attack, and that there were mistakes. The president has also sent his trusted and war-hardened general to Somalia hours after the attack on the Ugandan base. (See Details Here and There).
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