The KCCA Kiteezi Disaster, Selective Memory of Institutions & When Audit Warnings Become Weapons Against the Wrong People

In the Kiteezi trial, the prosecution’s next line of argument leans heavily on a series of internal audit reports and technical warnings allegedly “ignored” by the Executive and Deputy Executive Directors. But beneath the legal posturing lies a deeper truth: these reports were advisory, not executive instructions; institutional, not personal; and routed, as per law and practice, through the very directorates that have now escaped scrutiny.

What we are witnessing is not the unveiling of negligence, but the weaponization of internal audit systems to pursue officials who neither authored nor operationalized those reports, a distortion of process that, if accepted by the courts, would set a dangerous precedent for administrative governance in Uganda.

🔹 Internal Audit Reports Are Not Executive Directives: Under the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), 2015 and KCCA’s Financial and Audit Guidelines, the Director of Internal Audit (DIA) has a clear mandate: to issue risk advisories, not operational instructions. These reports: –

Are routed through line directorates (e.g., the DPHE),
Serve as early-warning mechanisms to improve institutional controls,
Require interpretation, technical validation, and budgeting before implementation.
No internal audit report carries an automatic obligation for direct action by the ED or DED unless it is escalated through formal decision-making channels, such as Senior Management Team (SMT) meetings or Council Executive Committee (CEC) resolutions. In this case, no such escalation has been proven.

So how can the failure to act on a report that never reached the executive desk be classified as negligence?

🔹 Technical Reports Belong to the Technicians: The prosecution also relies on reports from the Project Coordinator for Solid Waste Management, who, under KCCA’s organogram and administrative rules, reports to, and is supervised by, the Directorate of Public Health and Environment (DPHE). That directorate is: –

Legally responsible for interpreting engineering risks,
Operationally empowered to initiate remedial actions,
Accountable for escalating matters only when they exceed their mandate or resources.
There is no documentary trail, not a memo, email, SMT minute, or finance requisition, showing that the DED was served, copied, or instructed on the specific contents of these reports. Nor is there evidence that DPHE escalated concerns formally to the DED when internal audit warnings were raised.

This is not a case of negligence. It is a case of bureaucratic short-circuiting, now being rebranded, wrongly, as criminal neglect.

🔹 The Structural Irony: – The DPHE is Missing from the Dock: Once again, the absence of the DPHE, the official with direct operational responsibility over Kiteezi landfill, is deafening.

The DPHE received internal audit reports.
The DPHE supervised the Project Coordinator for Solid Waste.
The DPHE held an annual operations budget of UGX 3.1B.
The DPHE failed to respond to the ED’s own notated instructions following a funding request.
Yet, inexplicably, the DPHE has not been charged, and instead, the DED, who had no direct line of authority over the site, is facing criminal liability.

This is institutional scapegoating by omission, a silent admission that pursuing the structurally responsible officer might unravel the tidy narrative that someone “high up” must pay.

🔹 Financial Reality vs. Forensic Fantasy: The reports in question highlighted issues already well known and acknowledged in: –

The NEMA warnings of 2013, 2015, and 2020,
The Auditor General’s 2023 report,
The KCCA Strategic Plans and Ministerial Policy Statements for nearly a decade.
The idea that a “new warning” issued in July 2024, after years of ignored systemic risk, would somehow trigger instant structural remediation, on an already collapsed fiscal pipeline, is not only naïve, it is disingenuous.

Let’s call it what it is: – a legal smokescreen. The warnings were not new, the financial constraints were not hidden, and the authority to act did not lie with the DED. The failure, therefore, is systemic, not personal.

🔹 There Is No Evidence of Personal Knowledge or Deliberate Inaction: What the law requires, and what the prosecution fails to show, is proof of actual knowledge and a clear legal duty to act. None exists here: –

There are no acknowledgements or endorsements by the DED of the internal audit or technical reports.
There is no evidence of a formal tasking to him on those reports.
There are no SMT minutes, or directives linking the DED to any operational or financial refusal to act.
In criminal law, especially under charges of negligence, speculative awareness is not enough. The reliance on vague phrasing like “were aware or ought to have been aware” is doctrinally inadequate and fails under established precedent.

👉 Blame Without Evidence is Not Justice, It’s Ambition Masquerading as Accountability: What we are seeing is a familiar script in public administration: reports are filed, ignored at lower levels, but when disaster strikes, blame flows upward, not based on truth, but on optics. Internal audit and technical functions exist to protect institutions, not to become retroactive weapons used to sacrifice leaders at the altar of convenience.

In this case, the DED has been ensnared not by evidence of wrongdoing, but by a prosecutorial culture desperate for a headline. That culture must be resisted.