KAMPALA – Kampala Minister Beti Kamya has backed city councillors on their demand for accountability from the KCCA technical team, saying the law empowers them to do so.
The minister’s remarks comes on the heels of a heated debate at City Hall between political leaders and the technical team over whether the latter should be accountable to the former or not.
KCCA executive director Jennifer Musisi had earlier written to the minister and Lord Mayor, saying that councillors should back off the operations of the technical team.
However, in an interview over the weekend, the minister said that if Ms Musisi refuses to be held accountable by leaders, let her call for the amendment of KCCA Act to do away with the politicians at City Hall.
The minister’s call is a contrast to her earlier position of declaring all resolutions made from council meetings illegal. On January 25 this year, KCCA councillors blocked directors from the technical wing from leaving a council meeting. This came after the director of legal affairs, Charles Ouma from the technical wing asked his colleagues to walk out of the meeting because it was ‘irrelevant’ since Ms Kamya had vowed to cancel all the resolutions from the meeting saying it was illegal.
This is not the first time the minister and the KCCA executive director are clashing over policy issues. Ms Musisi in May last year queried the draft KCCA Bill which Ms Kamya took to Parliament.
In a May 15, 2017 letter to Ms Kamya, Ms Musisi wondered why the Bill was re-submitted to Parliament without her consent yet the same Minister had proposed to withdraw the same Bill.
Although the Bill seeks to scrap off the elections of the Lord Mayor by adult suffrage among other disputed amendments, Ms Kamya has since made a U-turn, saying that instead of disfranchising Kampala people, they will maintain the elections but amend the roles of the players at City Hall to reduce the current power stalemate.
