The Minister of Internal Affairs Gen. Jeje Odongo has warned all Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) operating on fake documents to put their house in order of face consequences.
Gen Odongo was addressing the media at Uganda Media Centre in Kampala on Wednesday. He said that many NGOs are operating in different districts but have not in conformity with the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Act 2016.
On 8th April this year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs notified all districts to present copies and certificate of operation for all active Community-Based Organisations (CBO) and an NGO inventory.
However, Gen Odongo says, out of 14,207 registered NGOs, who submitted in their documents only 3,810 had valid permits, while 10,397 had expired permits.
Gen Odongo wondered how NGOs were operating across 125 districts without complying with the Ugandan laws.
To identify NGO operating illegally, the Ministry of Internal Affairs has embarked on a verification exercise for all NGOs in non-compliant districts and also engaging the Ministry of Local Government.
“NGO verification will help to determine meaningful relationships, correlations & variations in the data with the NGO Bureau and districts to ascertain the status of NGOs operating in the country,” said Odongo.
“The statistics we have indicate that many NGOs are confidently operating on forged documents. The forgeries were either committed intentionally by the NGOs, or by middlemen hired by the NGOs to renew the permits & upon failure to meet the renewal requirements, resort to forging,” he added.
He added the many NGOs are ignorant of the verification law because a number of them think that possession a certificate of registration allows them to operate freely without any requirement to renew.
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