State House Press team has said its junior staff, erred while summoning socialite Sulaiman Kabangala Mbuga to explain his side of the story following allegations that he swindled money that was meant to pay cyber security experts that were hired to hack into social media accounts of top opposition politicians ahead of 2021 General Election.
In a statement issued on Friday evening, shortly after the Kampala Report published a story about the matter, State House said Sandra Ndyomugyenyi did not establish the facts about the matter before writing to SK Mbuga.
“We draw reference to a letter written by a member of State House Staff, a one Sandra Ndyomugyenyi to Sulaiman Kabangala Mbuga purportedly written on behalf of the Principal Private Secretary to H.E the President in which she makes reference to a complaint about Non-Payment for work by Cyber Security Experts,” State House said.
They urged the general public to disregard the letter and its contents.
“We would like to assure the general public to totally disregard the letter and its contents for it is baseless, false and should be treated with the full contempt it deserves. The Junior staff made an error of judgement in writing the letter without consulting her supervisor or establishing the true facts of the said allegation,” they said.
“We would like to caution the general public to be mindful of letters purportedly written on behalf of Senior Members of State House staff and when in doubt to always report to the State House AntiCorruption Unit (SHACU),” they added.
In the October 20, 2022 letter written by Ndyomugyenyi on behalf of the Principal Private Secretary to the President, Mbuga was needed at State House on October 25 for a meeting following reports that he had not paid the cyber security team.
“His Excellency the President has received a petition from experts of Cyber Security complaining of non- payment of work done under your company for the estate,” the letter to Mbuga reads in reads in part.
“The members complained that they handled top secret work for the Government and were to be paid by you. They claim that the information that you received part payment from the State House Comptroller and you have not remitted any shilling to them,” the letter adds.
The letter was also ordering the State House Comptroller to halt any further payments to S.K Mbuga until this matter is resolved.
The letter was responding to a series of other letters, including one written on behalf of Amanya Peter, Mugasho Lincoln and others, which was received by State House on October 14.
According to the letter, the cyber security team was tasked with cleaning Uganda’s reputation online pre and post-election period but have not been paid.
“We are the original authors of the online reputation letter that we wrote to clean Uganda’s reputation online pre and post-election period which was submitted by Mr. Suleiman Mbuga to Your office where we were entitled to 40%,” the letter reads in part.
“A lot of work was done to achieve the goals we set but to our disappointment we have not received any funds for the services rendered,” the letter adds.
The group further reveals that they were told to first finish hacking the Makerere University database during Guild elections and after that, they would get facilitation but no facilitation was received for that work either.
“We also came up with solutions to completely wipe out the Opposition social media accounts such as NUP, Bobi Wine, and his team and also gather surveillance on who is funding NUP, what their strategies are, who are the people pulling the strings, and any relevant information the state might need us to extract, but we are being held up due to lack of funding otherwise we would have finished our work a long time ago but instead we are being told to work minus any facilitation rendered,” the letter adds.
“We are the team that has been hacking a lot of anti-government people’s social media accounts and we are still doing more work behind the scenes and some of the recent work was the one of Kakwenza’ twitter account, but he was able recover his accounts after three days because of lack of facilitation from the state to hack into his mobile phone and emails which would help us wipe him off the internet forever,” the letter adds.
While the meeting took place, this website could not immediately gather what transpired in there.
SK Mbuga was not immediately available to respond to the accusations.
The opposition NUP party has expressed dismay at the revelation.
“Just a reminder: during the 2021 election, many NUP Twitter and Facebook accounts were hacked and taken over! When we started uploading DR Forms on our website to expose the grand election theft, it was also taken down! Now, seems those who did the job were not paid! Uganda!” he tweeted on Thursday.