Minister Byamukama says corruption at Uganda Civil Aviation Authority stinks

Fred Bamwesigye, director general of the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority, speaks at an earlier event. The authority he leads has been accused by President Yoweri Museveni of presiding over “massive corruption” at Entebbe International Airport, and reporting has linked Bamwesigye, a former UCAA human-resource manager, to the irregular recruitment at the centre of the allegations

KAMPALA — The Minister of Works and Transport, Fred Byamukama, has delivered a scathing verdict on the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA), describing the body that runs the country’s airspace and Entebbe International Airport as an institution that had “built a home known for corruption” where contractors were made to pay bribes before they could win any work.

Briefing the country on corruption in his sector, Byamukama said graft at the authority had become so brazen that officials “eat bribes in advance.” To secure a contract, he alleged, a bidder first had to hand over a cut — “you first pay 300 million, or you first pay 6 percent, 5 percent” (about US$82,000, or 5–6% of the contract value) — and some paid without ever being awarded the job. The authority’s contracts committee, he said, had been “ruined,” and there was evidence to prove it.

Three of the six senior officials whom President Yoweri Museveni ordered retired “in the public interest” last month come from UCAA, and it is their conduct that sits at the centre of the minister’s charge.

The three at the centre

The officials are Eng Ronald Twesigye, the head of the authority’s contracts committee, who also coordinated the multi-billion-shilling expansion of Entebbe International Airport; Eng Sooma Ayoub, the director in charge of airports and aviation security at Entebbe; and Hellen Wenene, the head of legal. Sources familiar with the inquiry say they are being investigated over governance and procurement-related irregularities at the authority. All three were removed under Article 99 of the constitution — an administrative act that ends an official’s tenure without establishing guilt. None has been charged or convicted.

Byamukama says some of the retired officials are now refusing to vacate their offices, and he has vowed they will be pursued. “They are there walking around with bags of money, thinking they will go back,” he said, warning that those who fail to hand over would be tracked down and arrested. He alleged that the UCAA officials had formed “a clique” that protected the scheme and normalised the taking of bribes in advance.

Symptoms at the airport

The minister presented a run of failures at Entebbe as the visible face of the rot. He recalled the episode in which Maria Nyerere, widow of the late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, was trapped in a malfunctioning lift — a breakdown the authority struggled to fix — as well as the burning of mosquito nets belonging to the health ministry stored at the airport, leaking air-conditioning and faulty electricals. Museveni’s own dismissal letter singled out the procurement of scanners at Entebbe as an example of the mismanagement he wanted stopped.

The scanners and the expansion works matter because they are where the money is. Entebbe has undergone a large, government- and externally-financed upgrade to raise its passenger capacity, and it is the procurement decisions around that programme — overseen in part by the contracts committee the minister says was compromised — that investigators are now examining.

A repeat, not a first

The authority has been here before. In July 2025, Museveni ordered UCAA to dismiss at least 152 staff he said had been hired despite lacking qualifications, blaming “massive corruption” for the appointments and citing the same trapped-lift incident. That directive followed a wave of viral complaints from travellers about extortion by airport staff, after which UCAA suspended some employees and said it did “not in any way condone” such acts, calling them “highly regrettable and unacceptable.” The latest purge reaches higher up the organisation, into the officials who ran procurement and legal affairs rather than the frontline staff caught demanding cash from passengers.