''Kazinda is obese, not depressed''

By Violet Nabatanzi

Interdicted principal accountant in the office of the Prime Minister Geoffrey Kazinda is mentally stable and can stand trial, Medical experts from Mulago National Referral Hospital have said.

Mulago hospital spokesperson Enock Kusasira told a news conference on Wednesday that doctors had ascertained this, despite earlier reports to the contrary.

"Kazinda has mental and physical capacity to engage in any challenging situation that requires mental and physical calories," he said, adding that Kazinda was examined on Tuesday by a team of experts led by Dr Fred Nakwagala, a senior consultant physician.

"They did not find any trace of depression and therefore there is no significant psychiatric illness as far as Kazinda is concerned," he said.

The experts, he added, only discovered a problem of obesity. "Obesity has its problems which include hypertension, poor quality of sleep and heart burn," he said.

On Tuesday the Prisons doctor Alex Kakoraki told Anti-Corruption Court in Kampala that Kazinda could easily collapse and die in court if he is forced to stand trial in his current state of health.

Kakoraki told court that he could not say how long this state would take, but that the drugs that Kazinda was prescribed will only begin to show results in three weeks.
    
Kusasira said that Kazinda was never referred to Butabika hospital by the Executive Director Dr. Baterana Byarugaba for mental checkup as reported in the press.

"If any referral is made there is a referral note. But in this case there is no written communication to the effect that this man was referred to Butabika. The Executive Director being a senior consultant if he was to refer Kazinda , he would refer him to a specific fellow consultant there, but this was not the case," Kusasira explained.

Kazinda is at the heart of the over sh40b fraud in the Prime ministers' office over which donors withheld aid from Uganda. He was arrested together with several of his colleagues, officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank.

Several other officials from the Prime Minister's office have been quizzed over the said corruption scandal.