Covid-19 lockdown: As the country went to sleep, the thieves went to work

A quarter of Uganda’s budget was stolen during the Covid-19 lockdown. That is a fact.

Do you remember the time last year when you closed your business to stay home, and stay safe?

While you did, some money hungry people were busy stealing money. According to the police annual crime report for 2020, the Covid-19 year, money hungry people robbed Shs 11.7 trillion from government and private institutions, which represents a quarter of this financial year's Shs 45 trillion budget.

According to the police report, 143 embezzlement cases led to the loss of Shs11.7trillion.

Out of the Shs 11.7 trillion, police have only recovered Shs 154 million. Of course, banks, individual companies have suffered the most, you remember the Pegasus case?

The private sector accounts for 133 cases and public sector only had 10 cases reported.

ENTER POLICE AND INVESTIGATIONS

Police lacks proper investigators with competence. Those with competence are concentrated in Kampala. Investigative officers upcountry don’t have skills, according to the CID spokesperson Charles Twine.

Here’s some context.

Highly trained investigative officers in the entire country are only 5000. Skilled fraud investigators in Kampala are only 500, out of these highly pro-efficient are not more than 20.

And by highly pro-efficient I mean those that can track money even online. The rest of the investigators investigate fraud looking for documents, they don’t know how to deal with the internet.

Yet most crimes through which money is siphoned are cyber related, trans-border crimes and stealing and depositing money on offshore accounts that require hideous processes.

The crime report tells us that almost half of these cases  are committed in the rural areas, and these are not my words.

It is also possible that a case could be registered as murder or homicide, but there could be financial loss in the same case.

But maybe it isn’t just about police alone, some of the money lost requires companies affected to carry out a thorough audit. Private sector audit is entirely the cost of these companies. For some companies like mobile money kiosks, even Shs 1 million robbed is enough capital taken away to close business.

Lastly, resources are a challenge.

Police doesn’t have enough money for movement of their investigators from one place to another, imaging exhibits, search in tracing, stationery. Police in my village can’t print paper, until they move to the district offices. In 2019, the world lost 23 trillion US dollars in such crimes and Uganda is not exceptional.

The security sector has come under fire recently especially during budgetary allocations.

Most of the expenditure is spent on buying of teargas equipment as opposed to facilitating investigations