Who is Adam Kalungi, Nebanda's boyfriend?

By Charles Etukuri

The death of Butaleja Woman MP Cerinah Nebanda has turned her boyfriend Adams Suleiman Kalungi into one of the country’s most wanted persons.

The Police have told New Vision online he was on their watch list and had not been arrested before for lack of evidence, but was highly suspected to be a drug dealer.

Last week, the Police bust the racket of suspected drug dealers believed to have been accomplices of Kalungi and arrested Ali Omara Al-Muzahim, a Ugandan; Ibrahim Muhammed, an Eritrean; Abdi Rashid-Bott, alias Igbal-Rashid, a Ugandan of Pakistani origin living in Kiwafu-Kabalagala.

Ali Omara was found with approximately half a kilogramme of a drug called Methamphetamine.

“Adam led a discreet life and you could not tell he was in the business,” Police spokesperson Judith Nabakooba said.

Born in a wealthy family in the late 1970’s, his 82-year-old father, Col. Mohammed Suleiman, is a former soldier in Idi Amin’s army. He operated several buses and also owned property in Jinja.

Kalungi attended St. James and Main Street Primary schools in the early 1980’s, before joining Jinja Secondary School, where he sat his Senior Four.

“He was my friend and I grew up seeing him at Lubas Road in Jinja. We went together to the same schools. I actually know his family,” says Peter, a classmate.

Unlike his other brothers and sisters, Kalungi grew up with his father, until he was around 18. When the family wealth dwindled in the early 1990s, he left in search of his mother who was of Somali origin and was then living in Kenya.

Nobody knows much about him thereafter, but after a short stint in Kenya, he resurfaced and joined the logistics business, where he worked as a clearing and forwarding agent, a job that saw him traverse East Africa.

According to Police sources, he was a widely travelled man and his business trips had taken him to Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and the DR Congo, among other countries.

It was during his logistics trade that he got introduced to drugs.

“He became an important clearing agent and ran one of the most discreet drug cells that operated in the region. His clients, the Police say, included high profile businessmen, politicians, musicians and the expatriate community,” adds a Police source.

With money coming in, he started helping his ailing father and even paid his rent in Jinja.

For last three years he has been unemployed, but has been accompanying Nebanda to functions and night clubs.

For the time he lived in Buziga, close friends say all they knew was he worked in a firm, but nobody can point it out.

“We could see him leave in the morning and return in the evening and thereafter leave to go and hangout,” a friend said. Patrons who knew Kalungi at Als Bar, a popular joint, say he was generous and was always in the company of different women, his favourite being the MP and another Sudanese woman in her mid-thirties.

His father last saw him in June 2010 when he accidentally bumped into him on the streets of Jinja.

In September, Kalungi and Nebanda were involved in a freak accident while driving from a joint in Bukoto. They rammed their car into a fence on the Lugogo bypass.

Kalungi also often drove the MP’s Toyota Progress as she drove her other car a Toyota Land Cruiser with personalised plates.

Two weeks later, Nebanda allegedly asked Kalungi to look for another car and he identified a Toyota Rav4 that police recovered in Buziga.

New Vision has learnt that the couple, started dating way back during the MP’s campus days and were planning a customary marriage.

“They started dating when she was a first-year student at Makerere University’s Faculty of Social Sciences. At that time, she was the only student in the faculty who had two personal cars and she even became president of the faculty’s