This week there were so many stories flying through our faces and for me the worst story of the week was Emmanuel Mutebile vs Chris Kassami. Can the whereabouts of $445m be disputed in a central bank? And nobody has been suspended? Public is not bothered only go out to welcome Bad Black in the streets instead of holding those placards with questions Where is US$445m if both the Central Bank Governor Emmanuel Mutebile and Chris Kassami don’t have the same answer to where the money is at?

Adding salt to injury before that money was sent from URA it took two weeks to travel from URA account to the treasury after Tullow Oil had paid its taxes then Mutebile said that the money went to replace reserves used to buy Fighter Jets. But Kassami and Maria Kiwanuka claim it’s still around and will be used to start building Karuma dam where is that money at right now?

The money was meant to start building Karuma dam but Mutebile said last week that he agreed with Museveni that it should replace the one used to buy Fighter jets in the reserves. Now the way it looks if this money is taken out of the reserves there will be no foreign exchange to ease the pressure on the depreciation of Shilling.

If we had Ethiopian energy managers, US$445 would get us 556MW for the Karuma dam Power Project. But in our case, it will just be enough to start some work, until ten times more money has been spent to get maybe 400MW!

The critical question on Ugandans’ lips is if that money is still there why is government so stuck in making that call for the process to begin because it is evident that Ugandans are not making anymore money because of lack of power.

That is the million dollar question, literally my guess is its there but during other things that are of benefit to them. After all Governor of the Central Bank says its not there and the Secretary to Treasury and Minister of Finance are likely talking politics. After all, how can we prove its not there? Even the Auditor General will be shown documents that its there. Can he count all the money in Bank of Uganda?

I think another question to ask is, if the money is there, why can’t work on Karuma start? Why not award the tender and start work? The 6th parliament was always blamed for delaying Bujagali. Who is to blame for delaying Karuma? They used to say they will use the reserves. How did the jets overtake Karuma as priority on using reserves?

It was always in President Museveni’s talk, proudly saying how we will finance Karuma. At least for the last ten years URA’s daily collections are known about roughly 10bn, 14 bn they can assign 1 billion a day for power development but that is expecting too much from the feeble brains that ‘plan’ for Uganda, anyway.