Robert Kabushenga --- the NRM's barking dog

On Thursday, March 9, 2006, the confrontation between the Canadian journalist Blake Lambert and the head of the NRM government Media Centra, Robert Kabushenga, reached a head when Lambert was deported from Uganda to Kenya.

Andrew Mwenda, who used to ask Lambert to sit in for him when he was a way from his "Andrew Mwenda Live" show, condemned the expulsion of Lambert during the show on Friday.

Lambert was on phone for an hour from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. At the end of the show, Lambert's last comment would be no hope for Uganda "without regime change."

Why did Kabushenga cause this expulsion when he very well knows the impact that it can have on Uganda's international image?

We have pieced together a dossier on Kabushenga based on submissions to Radio Katwe by various readers and concerned Ugandans.

Robert Kabushenga was born in 1968. He grew up much of the time in Kampala and in the late 1980s he used to live with his late mother and family in the KCC flats at Naguru.

In his early years, he was known as Robert Mukholi. His parents separated before he was a teenager and he adopted that name from his mother's tribe, the Bagisu.

His father lived for many years in Sweden.

Kabushenga seems to have coped with the break up of his family by developing a studied unsentimentality (some would even say callousness), and by chanelling his energies into pleasing authority and becoming successful.

His father returned to Uganda in the early 1990s and there was tension in the family. Kabushenga tried to identify with his father but there was too much distance between them, leading to more feelings of rejection in him.

He has tried hard to compensate for this deficit in family life by associating with the rich and famous, trying to cut off his links with people who knew him before the 1990s, and being a social climber.

At Makerere University, Kabushenga read Law but finished with only a pass degree. It was the second time in major exams for his image as a bright guy to fail him.

In 1996, Kabushenga together with the former Miss Uganda Linda Bazalaki and the lawyer Candy Wekesa and others formed Promoz, a company to organize the new stage of the Miss Uganda beauty contest.

Wekesa and one of Kabushenga's friends, Geoffrey Bataringaya (a son of the late UPC minister in the 1960s, Basil Bataringaya) were the Masters of Ceremony.

It was a successful event and it gave Kabushenga the public acceptance he had always thirsted for.

The contest produced the most famous of the recent Miss Uganda faces, Sheba Kerere, but it also left Promoz with a large debt. That debt made Kabushenga feel financially insecure.

(Incidentally, Candy Wekesa reportedly once had an affair with ISO director-general Brig. Jim Muhwezi; they used to meet openly near the swimming pool at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala and other places. The question is, was this just an ordinary adulterous affair, or was Muhwezi debriefing Wekesa? Is Candy Wekesa an ISO agent? But that is a story for another day.)

During a party to mark Winnie Byanyima's 40th birthday, which was held at the Viper Room nightclub at Hotel Equatorial in Kampala, Kabushenga was the Master of Ceremonies and turned out dressed in blue denim overalls. But these days he pretends to be more NRM than Museveni himself. Kabushenga does not normally talk about the rest of his family.

When he got married in 1999, he tried hard to make his wedding a social event by inviting prominent public figures like Angelina and James Wapakhabulo and others. Kabushenga's wife has a Ugandan father and her mother is Tanzanian.

Not long after they got married, it emerged that Kabushenga's wife was a cheat. She was secretly having an affair with his friend Geoffrey Bataringaya.

Word has it that one morning, Kabushenga left his Bugolobi flat for work. Soon after, Bataringaya sneaked into the flat after Kabushenga's wife tipped him off that it was safe to come.

It seems that Kabushenga forgot something at home or he was trying to prove the rumour of his wife's adultery, but after an hour or so, Kabushenga returned home unannounced, only to catch his wife and Bataringaya "in the act." This rumour is widely known in the circles of Kabushenga's friends and it will not surprise them to read it on Radio Katwe.com

It seems that humiliation of seeing his wife in his own bed with another guy hurt Kabushenga so much and as usual he turned to over-compensation to gain back his self-esteem.

But this would not have not turned Kabushenga into the hated figure that he is becoming these days. He still had many friends and many people still tuned in to his Saturday morning show on Capital Radio, "The Capital Gang" which he was hosting.

In 2004, the New Vision, the company where Kabushenga was Corporation Secretary, began to renovate and upgrade their whole premises. The bill came to 3.5 million dollars.

But somewhere somehow, there seemed to have been something improper with the way Kabushenga brought in or tried to influence the bringing in of a small sub-contractor or supplier to be part of the project.

When the New Vision did its auditing of the renovation, it discovered certain financial over-expenditure and it seems the trail led to Kabushenga, and he knew it. He had to jump before he was exposed and publicly humiliated as a thief and crook.

According to sources in Kampala, he had got to know that Uganda was trying to host the 2007 Commonwealth summit. He tried to lobby and manoeuvre to be appointed the director of communications and media for the summit, but it did not work out.

Next, he heard about the proposed new NRM Governent Media Centre. Again, he tried to lobby, this time with an urgency borne of desperation.

According to a Radio Katwe source, Kabushenga begged and begged Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa and Defence Minister Amama Mbabazi to influence his appointment as Media Centre head.

Apparently, he found more sympathy from Mbabazi and that is how he came to be Media Centre head, and that is why in the early days of his job, he used to hang around Mbabazi as if Mbabazi was his godfather.

During the presidential campaigns when FDC president Colonel Dr. Kizza Besigye was meeting huge crowds during his visit to West Nile and Ajumani, President Yoweri Museveni called a meeting at State House. Museveni demanded to know why Besigye was getting so much publicity in the newspapers and on radio and Museveni's presense in the media was relatively insignificant. "Why do I pay you?" Museveni roared in anger looking at a shaken Kabushenga.

Kabushenga had never been as shaken as that in his life. He immediately began to visit various media houses in Kampala to press and beseech editors and programme directors to give Museveni more prominent coverage.

Fortunately for him, his colleagues in the media who saw how shaken he was, decided to save him and that was when you began seeing more photographs of Museveni addressing small groups of people in Luwero but which even papers like "Daily Monitor" were terming "crowds."

Now that Kabushenga has opened a war with the media by pushing for the deportation of Blake Lambert, he can expect no more sympathy. All his dirt and failings will come out.

Already, the foreign media has started a quiet and well-coordinated campaign to have Kabushenga black-listed around the world as an official who is leading the repression of press freedom.

Confidential documents between the Media Council headed by Fr. John Mary Waliggo and the NRM Media Centre found their way to the Ugandan press.

One of the Media Council officials, Paul Mukasa, tried to take a principled stand as far as Lambert's deportation saga was concerned. He tried to argue Lambert's case.

Kabushenga believes that it was Mukasa who leaked the documents to the media. According to the documents, which Andrew Mwenda read on air on March 10, Waliggo sensed that the government was determined to deport Lambert and Waliggo was afraid of confronting the state.

To appease the state, he tried to advise the state to circumvent the Media Council (which is the legal body that monitors Uganda's media industry. Not to be confused with Kabushengas Media Center, an NRM government creation -Ed), and instead wait for Lambert's visa to expire and then when he tries to reapply to stay in Uganda, deny him an entry visa.

From this saga, it seems that Kabushenga, who is still shaken by the way Museveni blasted and humiliated him in front of his colleagues, has been trying to justify himself as a loyal NRM man.

According to a source familiar with the Lambert case, the original plan by the ISO intelligence agency was to come without warning at night, pick Lambert from his flat at Blacklines House in downtown Kampala and then whisk him off to the airport at Entebbe.

It seems ISO was advised against that.

Is is thought that the Israeli secret service Mossad have taken an interest in the case of how Blake Lambert, who is a Jewish, could have been harassed and treated so badly by a Ugandan government which claims it is friendly to Israel.

Israel has never forgotten how an Israeli citizen, Dora Bloch, died mysteriously in Uganda in 1976 during the Israeli raid at Entebbe.

Uganda's old MiG-21 planes were overhauled in 2002 by the Israeli Defence Industries.