Last week, the Minister of Health and former Director General of the Internal Security Organisation, Major General Jim Muhwezi, was in the news again. He was appearing before the commission of inquiry into how the Global Fund on AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria was misused in Uganda.
The swindling of the money led to the fund cutting off more than 145 million dollars in funding in 2005 to Uganda.
The public has failed to understand this man Muhwezi. He has been censured before but was re-appointed. He has money that cannot be explained except for massive corruption, but he cannot be removed from the political scene.
When he faced Justice James Ogoola last week to testify his side of the story, Ogoola asked him, “Have you no sense of horror?”
Ogoola was asking the wrong question and addressing the wrong man.
In this intelligence briefing, Radio Katwe will trace the public life of Muhwezi and we shall help the public understand how he operates.
Jim Muhwezi was born into a family in Rukungiri in western Uganda. His father was an Anglican Protestant Reverend and a staunch supporter of the Uganda People’s Congress ruling party of Milton Obote.
Muhwezi is a Muhima of the Bahororo sub-tribe (the same group of the Chief of Defence Forces, General Aronda Nyakirima.)
Radio Katwe has not managed to find out the name of the secondary school Muhwezi attended for his O’Levels, but what we know is that he fled that school after raping a female student there.
He completed his A’Level exams at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School. He joined Makerere University in the late 1970s where he studied for a Law degree. At that time, he also secretly joined FRONASA, the rebel group commanded by Yoweri Museveni.
Museveni found a way of getting Muhwezi to join Idi Amin’s State Researh Bureau, the intelligence service at that time. Muhwezi was planted in the State Research Bureau to gather information that would help Museveni fight Amin better.
Muhwezi during his time at the State Research Bureau saw something which shocked him. Most of the killings under Amin which were allegedly being committed by Amin’s Kakwa, Lugbara and Nubian tribesmen were actually being committed by the exiled Tutsi refugees in Uganda (the Banyarwanda) on orders of Museveni.
The purpose was to commit these heinous crimes and have the world blame them on Amin. That was when Muhwezi developed an intense hatred for the Tutsi.
After Amin fell, Muhwezi joined the Uganda police force while still a Museveni sympathizer. He was arrested in 1981 after Museveni started his bush war and he was detained by the UPC government at Jinja Road Police station.
He escaped, he claims, with the help of Hope Kivengere, the daughter of Bishop Festo Kivengere.
In the bush, Museveni appointed him head of intelligence after the head of intelligence, David Tinyefuza, misbehaved so many times.
Muhwezi continued in that role when the NRM came to power in 1986.
In 1987, Muhwezi married a pretty girl called Susan Kabonero and their wedding reception was hosted at State House.
According to some reports Radio Katwe has, Muhwezi like many of his fellow NRA officers became a serial womanizer and he got a child with his cousin, a woman who worked with the UNDP either in Nairobi or Kampala.
He also loved the flashy life and used to siphon off money from the classified ISO budget for his extravagant lifestyle.
Some relatives who have lived in the Muhwezi home say he is vain and childish like Kampala businessman Peter Sematimba.
These relatives say that Muhwezi and his wife Susan used to spend around the same time in front of the mirror each morning.
One day at Kisementi in Kampala around 1997 or 1998, Muhwezi was trying to impress a certain woman at the Just Kickin’ sports bar. He pulled out a ward of U.S. dollar bills from his wallet and was running his fingers through them.
He had an affair with the Kampala lawyer and socialite Candy Wekesa.
He is as childish as that. But although he has that pimp-ish character, under his watch for 10 years until he was replaced in 1996, there was no coup in Uganda or too much instability to threaten the centre of power, Kampala.
It seems that late in the 1990s, President Museveni started sleeping with Muhwezi’s wife Susan. Jim was humiliated but as a serving officer he could do nothing about getting even with his commander-in-chief.
In 1998, Museveni told a meeting at State House of Ankole members of parliament that he had information that Muhwezi was plotting against him.
Even recently in February, Smart Musolin reported that Muhwezi had refused to give rooms in his Rukungiri hotel for the Elect Museveni task force.
When Muhwezi is humiliated as a man, he uses sex to retaliate.
In the early 2000s, Muhwezi wooed a girl called Ruth Kandehura (better known as “Kande”) Sabiti. Kande is related to Susan and was brought to the Muhwezi home by Susan as a guardian.
Kande’s father, as Radio Katwe has reported, was Thompson Sabiti, a Muhima civil servant resident in Entebbe whom Museveni secretly ordered murdered in 1983 near the Lake Victoria Hotel so Museveni could put the blame on the then Vice President Paulo Muwanga and also get the angry Bahima to hate the UPC government and support Museveni’s NRA.
Muhwezi started sleeping with Kande Sabiti but it seems Susan Muhwezi did not suspect anything. Muhwezi even put Kande up in a flat in Bugolobi at his expense.
But one day, Susan picked up Jim’s cell phone and noticed that there were many SMS messages from Kande. She wondered what was going on and kept track of her husband.
Susan realized that these two were having a sexual relationship and she went mad.
She called her brother Bob Kabonero of Kampala Casino and they called for a wider family meeting to put Jim to task.
It was decided that Kande, who at that time was in London, should be summoned also to the family tribunal. Muhwezi was at the airport to receive Kande and they came walking hand in hand.
At the family meeting, Muhwezi point-blank told Susan that she was his third wife and Kande was now his fourth wife, so Susan should leave him alone.
Muhwezi asked the assembled family members one question: “What moral authority did Susan have to question his relationship with Kande?”
The family members were quiet because they knew he was hurt and humiliated and he was indirectly talking about Susan’s sleeping with Museveni.
The other way he took revenge for Museveni sleeping with his wife was to go where it hurt Museveni most, that is by sleeping with his favourite child Natasha.
So that is Muhwezi for you. The man you see in public flashing money about and dressed in sharp suits is not a happy man in private.
The way he was answering Justice Ogoola, the head of a commission appointed by President Museveni, told a lot. Muhwezi by trying to dismiss Ogoola was indirectly challenging Museveni to sack him as Minister of Health.
Muhwezi was not really attacking Justice Ogoola. He was hitting at Museveni.
Muhwezi knows that Museveni fears him so a number of reasons. Muhwezi is the one man in Kampala who knows Museveni’s most petty and embarrassing weaknesses better than almost anybody in the world.
It is Jim Muhwezi who has acted as Museveni’s pimp for many years.
When Museveni wanted to sleep with housemaids, cooks, office secretaries and take women secretly on his trips abroad, it was Muhwezi who used to arrange for the women to be put on the presidential jet behind Janet Museveni’s back.
Muhwezi also knows Museveni’s personal record of massive corruption and theft of state money and assets, so he knows that by being accused of embezzling Global Fund money, the real culprit, Museveni, is being let off the hook.
Jim Muhwezi also knows the inside story of who really ordered the shooting down of the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994 and the genocide that followed.
That is why he knows he is untoucheable. He knows who the Thief-in-Chief is in Uganda.
These are things that only Radio Katwe can bring you in Uganda. We explain the political, money, and sexual forces that operate behind the scenes in Museveni’s regime.
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