Army thought I was hiding Anitah’s cash’ - Nameere speaks out on arrest

Justine Nameere, the Masaka City Woman MP and newly appointed State Minister for Local Government, has spoken out about her arrest and brief detention by military operatives on May 15.

Nameere was picked up in the evening by military operatives as she moved in a procession with supporters in Masaka City, shortly after she was sworn in as the area MP. She was driven away in a drone van and released two days later.

Speaking in an interview with Bukedde TV, Nameere said the soldiers who arrested her had been given false intelligence. 

The soldiers, she said, had been fed wrong information by an unscrupulous person that she was hiding sacks of money belonging to former Speaker Anita Among.

The army operatives, according to Nameere, believed that the money was meant to bribe MPs not to vote for Jacob Oboth Oboth, who had been endorsed by the NRM leadership for Speaker of the 12th Parliament.

She added that by the time President Museveni intervened and sent another team to rescue her, some of her captors had started realising that they had acted on wrong information.

“My captors were already starting to regret it. I could hear them arguing with other people on the phone, that they had been misled,” she said.

“The story they got was that I had Hon Among’s cash and was to distribute it as bribes to members of parliament to boycott Jacob,” she said.

Nameere says she explained to them that she could not have worked against Oboth Oboth because of their close family relationship.

“I told them, whoever had them that information was mad because I could not antagonise Hon Oboth, a person that even attended my own marriage ceremony. He is more like a father to me. I know Jacob, I have been to his home,” Nameere said.

She said the operatives did not ask her many questions, but appeared to realise that what they found was not what they had expected.

In the interview, Nameere also denied ever receiving any money from the former speaker, adding that the two were merely friends who had worked together, long before Among became speaker.