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The two guns allegedly recovered from a Nairobi City apartment where Dr Kizza Besigye and his aide Obeid Lutale were arrested had been planted there as part of an ‘intelligence operation’, a star prosecution witness has told the High Court.

Andrew Wilson, alias Orlando, made the revelation yesterday during cross-examination by the defence in the ongoing treason trial against Dr Besigye, Lutale and UPDF officer Capt Denis Oola.

The witness, a former military officer, agreed with defence lawyer Kizito Faroq Kamulegeya that the guns and what was described as old fake currency were already inside the Riverside Apartments room before Lutale arrived.

‘You testified that the Riverside Apartment was pre-arranged for you,’ Mr Kamulegeya asked.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Mr Wilson replied.

Counsel Kamulegeya then asked the witness to confirm that the items were already in the room before the arrival of Lutale.

‘Yes,’ Mr Wilson answered.

The witness said the two pistols had been placed on a counter near the entrance of the room.

Mr Wilson, who has spent close to a month on the witness stand, said he became apprehensive after seeing the firearms and decided to unload them because he considered his safety more important.

‘I didn’t want loaded guns in my room. I unloaded them for safety purposes,’ he told the court presided over by Justice Emmanuel Baguma.

The defence, however, questioned why Mr Wilson, who claimed to have received military training in several countries, would touch firearms whose presence in the room he did not understand.

‘With the military training you acquired from America, Nigeria, South Africa, the Middle East…, was it wise for you to touch the gun with your fingers?’ Mr Kamulegeya asked.

Mr Wilson maintained that he was acting out of concern for his safety.

He also acknowledged that his fingerprints could have remained on the firearms and that he did not have a Kenyan firearms licence.

‘I considered safety first,’ he said.

Counsel then put it to the witness that the guns had been deliberately planted to implicate his client, Lutale.

‘It looks like it was to implicate A2 (Hajj Lutale),’ Mr Wilson responded.

The cross-examination further raised questions about how the alleged firearms recovery was handled after the arrests.

Mr Wilson told the court that after police arrested him, he was not interrogated and that the apartment was not cordoned off as a crime scene as it’s normally done in criminal matters.

He further said he and an associate identified only as Zac later returned to the apartment and spent the night there.

Counsel suggested that the sequence of events-including the alleged planting of the guns and fake currency, the escape after police stormed the premises, and the subsequent return to the apartment to enjoy their night-pointed to a stage-managed operation.

But Mr Wilson, in response, said, ‘It was an intelligence operation.’

Earlier in his evidence-in-chief, Mr Wilson told the court that he waited for Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale at Riverside Apartments on November 16, 2024, where he secretly recorded their conversation about allegedly overthrowing the Ugandan government by force of arms.

Further in the cross-examination yesterday, Wilson told the court that he had travelled to Kenya by road from Uganda, starting his journey in Entebbe where he had a meeting before being driven to the Kenyan border.

He didn’t tell the court which place in Entebbe he started his journey.

At the border, he said, he changed vehicles and was driven in a Kenyan car to Riverside Apartments in Nairobi.

Mr Wilson said he did not know the identities of the people who transported him and that he left Uganda on November 15, arriving in Nairobi the following day.

Dr Besigye and Lutale had travelled to Nairobi to attend the launch of a book by former Kenyan Justice Minister Martha Karua, where he was the chief guest.

He and Mr Lutale were subsequently arrested and returned to Uganda, where they were initially charged before the General Court Martial with unlawful possession of firearms and live ammunition.

The prosecution alleged that on November 16, 2024, the two were found at Riverside Apartments in possession of two pistols and eight rounds of pistol ammunition.

The firearms were described as weapons ordinarily reserved for the Defence Forces.

Under the charge of unlawful possession of firearms c/s 4 (1) and (2) of the Firearms Act, Cap 320, it was the prosecution’s case that Dr Besigye and Lutale, on November 16, 2024, while at Riverside Apartments in Nairobi, Kenya, were in unlawful possession of a Pistol model 27 KAL No. 765, and Pistol HB 1014 1953, which are ordinarily the monopoly of the Defence Forces.

Under the charge of being in possession of live ammunition, the prosecution contended that on the very day, at the same place at Riverside Apartments, they were found in unlawful possession of 8 rounds of pistol ammunition, which are ordinarily the monopoly of the Defence Forces.

The aforementioned charges were later dropped following the Supreme Court’s January 31, 2025 landmark judgment declaring the trial of civilians by military courts unconstitutional.

The judgment arose from former Nakawa MP Michael Kabaziguruka’s case and led to the transfer of pending cases involving civilians from the military court system to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Parliament later amended the UPDF Act to allow military trials of civilians in narrowly defined circumstances, particularly where a civilian is jointly charged with a serving soldier alleged to be the principal offender.

Treason charges

The State subsequently charged Dr Besigye, Mr Lutale and Capt Oola with treason, alleging that they participated in meetings in Uganda and abroad, including in Athens, Geneva and Nairobi, as part of a plan to overthrow the government.

The three deny the allegations.

Dr Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate, has been absent from the proceedings after collapsing in the dock over a month ago while protesting against legal representation he said he had not chosen.

Makerere University is reintroducing supplementary examinations to allow eligible final-year students with pending exams (locally known as retakes) to be re-examined so they can graduate in time.

Vice Chancellor Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, in an interview yesterday, reported that the University Council had already approved the return of supplementary examinations for students and several students have already sat for the same.

‘Makerere will hold one supplementary examination session each year, at the end of Semester Two and before the next academic year begins,’ he said.

Prof Nawangwe explained that a policy on eligibility and operational rules has been put in place, giving qualifying students a limited chance to address what he termed as marginal academic shortfalls, without lowering the standards of the university awards.

Affected students are required to register their interest in sitting for these exams with the respective departments before they can be allowed to be assessed ahead of graduation.

Makerere stopped the supplementary exam system in 2001, when the university transitioned from a term to a semester system. Under the old system, supplementary exams were usually held in September, which the students referred to as the September conference, ahead of the annual graduation ceremonies in October.

Since then, current rules stipulate that once a student fails a course, they have to wait until it is next offered.

However, if one voluntarily seeks to redo a particular exam in order to improve their final grade, they also have to apply to retake the course exam.

The original grade is always kept for final calculation and will be used in determining the final grade if one scores lower on a retake on the supplementary exam.

Prof Nawangwe acknowledged that retakes have been a thorn in the flesh of parents and thousands of students, who not only have to pay for the retakes but also wait for a whole year before re-sitting the papers that they failed.

‘Students who have failed even one paper in their final year would have to wait for another year before they can graduate. Retakes affect thousands of students, according to the few colleges that have already sat for supplementary examinations,’ he said, adding, ‘Thousands of students are going to benefit from this.’

Previously, finalists who had a backlog to clear before graduating were tasked to pay Shs20,000 as re-examination fees, a Shs20,000 library fee, course tuition fees, and standard university registration fees, before sitting for the retake exams.

Mr Ebenezer Wamezaya, Makerere University’s health minister and a third-year student pursuing a Bachelor of Pharmacy, commended the university for the initiative, noting that the decision made is a win for both students and the administration.

‘Supplementary exams are a win for both the students and administration given that it enables students with retakes to graduate with the rest of their coursemates. In the past, students with retakes would sit for a whole year doing nothing … it was hard for them to secure employment,’ Mr Wamezaya said.

However, Ms Prossy Nakayiki, the acting academic registrar of Makerere University, said supplementary examinations are a preserve for students with one or two retakes, and the application fees vary according to the programme offered.

Since taking charge of the Ministry of Local Government in late May, Mr Balaam Barugahara has disrupted the standard operating procedure of Uganda’s public administration.

Rather than remaining behind a polished desk in Kampala awaiting sanitised administrative briefs, he has taken the ministry directly into the districts. His relentless field inspections, unannounced visits, and direct town-hall engagements have become the defining features of his tenure. To a comfortable political elite, these outings look like disruptive populism. But to ordinary Ugandans who have spent years enduring broken feeder roads, ghost payrolls, and shuttered health units, they represent something far more critical: accountability finally arriving at the last mile.

The results of his field-driven oversight speak for themselves. In Mbale, surprise inspections exposed ghost workers on health centre payrolls and inflated school head counts that were quietly siphoning millions from public coffers every term. Culpable headteachers and district officials were promptly interdicted and handed over to investigative authorities. In Mbarara, he pressed city officials on procurement delays and stalled infrastructure. Across West Nile, in places like Pakwach, citizens turned out with branches and songs-not for photo opportunities, but because a minister was finally asking the hard questions about missing medicine and abandoned classrooms that they had whispered in frustration for years.

In Kassanda, his visits infused a renewed sense of operational urgency among technical officers. Predictably, this hands-on enforcement has drawn intense push back from the chattering classes. Critics dismiss his public arrests and confrontations as “roadside pronouncements” and “humiliation,” labelling his methods unorthodox or undignified. Yet these same commentators rarely ask why learned district engineers, District Health Officers, and District Education Officers allowed local services to rot in the first place while drawing State salaries.

The temporary discomfort of a few administrators facing public scrutiny must never outweigh the daily suffering of citizens whose taxes fund those positions. More importantly, Balaam’s approach has achieved something vital: it has inspired genuine courage in ordinary citizens to stand up and demand what is rightfully theirs.

For the first time in a long while, wananchi see a government official who sides with them against the protected class of negligent district workers.

Rather than trying to castigate the minister into compliance or forcing him back into boardroom quietness, our collective responsibility as leaders, civil society, and local government actors is to support him. An open-minded leader who thrives on field truth can be made infinitely more effective if we feed him foolproof intelligence and actionable data.

We must supply the minister with verified, audit-ready information on district leakages-from land-grabbing schemes and tender board manipulations to substandard road construction. Strengthening his office with structured grassroots intelligence ensures surprise visits transition from reactive fire fighting into systematic, institutionalized clean-up.

Due process must always be respected, and no single minister can undo decades of bureaucratic inertia overnight. But the alternative-elite silence while public services collapse-is unacceptable. Balaam has shown the political will and the openness to listen. Ugandans must now back his urgency with bulletproof facts, ensuring this moment becomes a permanent turnaround for local governance across our nation.