Museveni’s Crafty…
Until recently, John Guma-Komwiswa was living in two worlds. By day he had a good job. In the morning he would commute a short distance from his home in Bermondsey to Becket House, a central London office that works with asylum and immigration cases.
There, as a senior caseworker, he dealt with the sea of bureaucracy attached to asylum cases from across the world - including, it seems, his native Uganda.
What his employers may not have known was that during his spare time, Mr Guma-Komwiswa had a very different identity - a political post, in fact.
As secretary-general for the UK and Ireland chapter of the National Resistance Movement (NRM), headed by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, he was the figurehead in Britain for a grouping that helped the guerrilla general seize power in 1986 and rule the country. Now his professional and private life have been put on hold while a specialist team of Home Office investigators collaborates with police to probe allegations of corruption.
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John Guma-Komwiswa
One complaint, seen by the Guardian, states that three Ugandan asylum seekers’ cases were “frustrated and rejected” because of “direct malice or bad influence on the decision of their individual cases” by Mr Guma-Komwiswa.
Investigators are likely to want to establish how a Ugandan political figure secured a role within the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and, crucially, whether any asylum claims were improperly influenced.
Mr Guma-Komwiswa has been suspended from his job at the Home Office and has resigned from his political post at the NRM. But he said he was not concerned about the inquiry. “I’m not bothered at all. If there is no truth in what they’re saying, why should I be bothered? Obviously, you judge [asylum] on merit - that is Home Office procedure.”
Mr Guma-Komwiswa’s two worlds collided at a meeting in Bermondsey this year, scheduled in the run-up to the first democratic elections in Uganda in 26 years in February. The Guardian has obtained a video of the meeting, held on February 11 for various political groupings within the Ugandan community to debate the forthcoming polls.
The footage shows Mr Guma-Komwiswa sitting on a panel of seven political representatives from different parties, introduced by the chairman as “Mr Guma-Komwiswa of NRM”.
Alex Oringa, an immigration lawyer with ties to Ugandan opposition groups, said he took his seat at the meeting, looked up, and saw someone he recognised from his asylum work. He raised a point of information. “I asked him to confirm whether he was the very Mr Guma who works in the Home Office,” he recalled. “I said, 'How do you exercise impartiality deciding on their matters when you are identified so clearly with the regime?”
In the months that followed, Mr Oringa filed two separate complaints to the immigration service’s complaints unit. He said that one Ugandan client’s immigration matters should not have been administered by a leading representative of the ruling party from the regime she was claiming to flee. Another client, he alleged, had been dissuaded from applying for asylum by Mr Guma-Komwiswa. It would take several months for an investigation to begin.
One complainant, Sarah Male, a 47-year-old member of the high-profile royal family of the Ugandan kingdom of Buganda, told the Guardian: “I met him in a Weatherspoons pub in Forest Gate. He told me, ‘You know Sarah, what you need to do is go back to Museveni, you can’t claim asylum here.’ He was quarrelling with me, telling me that Museveni has to teach me. He told me there is no way I would get asylum here.”
Another, Susan Mporampora, 21, said she was surprised to discover that a man she had met in a social context in Forest Gate, and had asked her questions about her asylum claim, turned out to be the Home Office official corresponding with her lawyers over immigration matters.
Mr Guma-Komwiswa firmly denies any suggestions that he discouraged people from applying for asylum, or that he used his position to frustrate or reject applications. “Everything is total rubbish - it’s all lies,” he said. “From the people I have spoken to [I believe], they have done this for political purposes. What do they hope to achieve by attacking an innocent individual?”
The implications of the probe have spread to Uganda, where opposition leader Kizza Besigye, from the Forum for Democratic Change, has alleged that “Museveni’s spies” have infiltrated the Home Office. “The UK taxpayer’s money pays Museveni’s spies, they are sponsored on official missions,” he told a pan-African website based in New York, The Black Star News.
Since 1998, more than 2,800 asylum applications from Ugandans were initially declined - 195 were granted refugee status or other leave to remain by the Home Office.
In the last three quarters of this year, 95 Ugandans were initially refused asylum - none were granted refugee status.
