Total Chaos As IGG Halts NDA Board Inauguration

The inspectorate of government has, in writing, blocked the inauguration of the new governing board for National Drug Authority (NDA). The deliberately very secretive swearing-in of the board was supposed to be held on Monday at 6am at Four Points by Sheraton in Kololo.

For unknown reasons, the organizers who refused to invite the media reporters wanted it to be done very secretively so that whoever is unhappy with how the new board has been constituted can be advised to go to court where perpetrators are sure to secure a favourable judgment.

In halting the planned inauguration, the inspectorate of government, mandated under article 230 of the constitution, is concerned that the board, going to be the 9th since NDA’s establishment in 1993, is being contested because the manner in which it was constituted didn’t comply with the basic legal provisions.

Firstly, the NDA Act requires the Authority to have 20 members yet the new list has only 18. Two members have been excluded namely Ekwaro Obuku who represents Uganda Medical Association, and Dr. Tom Magambo who is supposed to represent CID, as per the NDA Act. Magambo has always been disinterested, rarely attending to any NDA stuff.

As for the other members, they were re-appointed but controversially without the consent of the agencies, organizations or institutions they are statutorily supposed to represent. These include Dr. Muhammed Mbabali who represents Uganda Dental Association. He has been on the board for three terms stretching 9 years, just like the conflicted board chairman Dr. Medard Bitekyerezo, whose coherence capabilities have previously been questioned in whistle blower petitions to the IGG and other investigating agencies.

The inspectorate’s circular stopping the planned Monday inauguration of the new board, a secretive function Bitekyerezo was determined to hold at Kololo-based ‘Four Points by Sheraton’ on Monday as early as 6am, indicates that the relevant constituencies which the clandestinely reappointed members represent were not consulted. The members were also never subjected to the mandatory security vetting, as to their conduct, by Interpol.

The other concern is that the mandatory certificate of financial implications, which has to be issued by the ministry of finance, was never obtained. The NDA board’s appointing authority must have deliberately avoided the ministry of finance because the reappointment of Bitekyerezo as board chairman clearly contravenes the president’s 2024 directive, communicated through head of public service Dr. Lucy Nakyobe, prohibiting appointment of political failures or defeated politicians to government MDAs boards.

In a widely circulated communication, Nakyobe, in her capacity as cabinet secretary, made it clear that the president’s directive took immediate effect yet the reappointment of Bitekyerezo, who in 2016 was defeated from the position of Mbarara municipality (now city) MP, directly contravened the same directive by the president.

Cabinet approval, which has also become a rule of prudent practice over the years now (ministers being permitted to make input into who goes on the board), was also disregarded by the NDA governing board’s appointing authority. The IG directive stopping the inauguration also raises a red flag on this too. The same communication by the inspectorate makes it clear that Bitekyerezo is also being investigated for controversially using the ‘NDA Commission,’ which is like a board within a board, to sideline and disregard fellow board members whose ideas he isn’t comfortable having on board.

The other members of the ‘NDA Commission’ include Dr. Nelson Masuba from Uganda Aids commission and Latif Sebaggala’s wife Hajjat Anifa Sengendo as members. Members sitting on the main board have always been uncomfortable about this ‘NDA Commission’ and even contacted the solicitor general seeking his legal guidance but they were frustrated. The inspectorate is investigating claims that whenever the board chairman finds it hard to convince all the 20 members on any issue, he ignores them and procures the desired decision through the ‘NDA Commission.’

Besides the above procedural impropriety concerns, the inspectorate justifies the halting of the new board inauguration because they need time to first investigate concerns relating to alleged conflict of interest. This is in relation to the fact that NMS and JMS, which are some of the licensees and regulatees whose operations NDA is mandated to supervise and regulate, have representatives on the governing board.

This was supposed to be cured by the amendments to the NDA Act, which have been frustrated by powerful people at MAAIF, UNBS and other agencies. The ministry of health spirit motivating this change in the principal law is that such amendments will strengthen NDA and give it additional mandate to carry out mandatory quality testing on the importation and manufacturing of things like veterinary drugs, cosmetics, medical devices, condoms’ quality, gloves’ quality and food stuffs etc. The same reforms are supposed to re-organize the NDA governance structure including streamlining the board and trimming its size from the current 20 members to 7 or 9.

As the inauguration of the board, whose tenure expired 19th February 2026, is being halted, the inspectorate will be inquiring into why all this obvious conflict of interest has been going on for this long and how different actors have been benefiting from the same. NDA board chairman Dr. Medard Bitekyerezo has also been accused of being conflicted because he chairs the Global Fund Uganda chapter’s country coordinating mechanism, whose medical importations NDA is mandated to quality-test and authorize or disallow in case they are found to be counterfeit and not good enough to ensure public safety.

Under the Bitekyerezo-led country coordinating mechanism, the Global Fund Uganda management imports into the country malaria, TB and HIV/Aids drugs. These, by law, have to be cleared by NDA, which Bitekyerezo heads as board chairman.

To the inspectorate, this is unacceptable conflict of interest which has to be investigated and mitigated before the new board can be inaugurated. The inspectorate also wants to establish why members like Bitekyerezo and Muhammed Mbabali have been on the board for such a long time, yet prudent practice would require diversification of the same so that new actors can come in too.

The inspectorate had also received whistle blower reports indicating that this conflict of interest has often happened whereby NDA enforcement officers have often been asked to back off whenever the drugs or condoms consignment stopped or seized for destruction (over wanting quality standards) belonged to Global Fund.

The inspectorate needs time to comprehensively investigate such claims because the resultant harm could result into what industry sources call ‘bio-terrorism.’ In 2022, 4.1m condoms importation had to be seized and burnt due to quality safety concerns and the same caused animosity between NDA management and some board members. The inspectorate needs time to thoroughly investigate how rampant such incidents have been at NDA under Bitekyerezo’s leadership.

The other things the inspectorate is inquiring into, while the board inauguration remains on halt, include the circumstances under which the quality management head Dora Namyalo, a former Nkuba kyeyo previously employed at CIPLA, came to be designated the personal assistant to NDA board chairman Bitekyerezo.

Circumstances surrounding PDU head Patrick Okema (formerly an employee of the scandal-stricken Uganda Airlines) was recruited is also being inquired into, besides the extent to which his first cousin’s employment at the IG has previously been leveraged to shield wrongdoing at NDA.

The other interesting leads detectives from the inspectorate are looking into relate to why all the newly reappointed NDA board members indicated 29th January 2026 as the date they received and accepted reappointment, yet this actually happened on 17th February as they arrived for what was ordinarily supposed to be their last board meeting. The investigators from the inspectorate are looking at this willful falsification as fraudulent enterprise, as was advised by the powerful PA. Corporate governance breaches manifested in Dora Namyalo regularly attending board meetings, even when she isn’t a board member, are equally being inquired into.

For insisting to mislead magistrate her worship Gladys Kamasanyu into turning up on Monday at ‘Four Points by Sheraton’ to preside over what the inspectorate has dully halted and stopped, some defiant organizers of the Monday inauguration ceremony like NDA lawyer Diana Kabuzire and the head of HR risk being jailed by the inspectorate as was done to Kyambogo University bosses some years ago, should they insist on holding the now banned inauguration ceremony, which had originally been slated for Monday.