CSI:Several attempts had been made on Tamale's life

 

 

On Tuesday, April 16, after a day’s work, Meddie Tamale, who worked as an accountant at Dembelyo Telecom, a company that was an agent of MTN in Mukono, stayed behind to balance his books. As it approached 7:30pm, he closed the shop, entered his car — a Toyota Ipsum registration number UAR 476D — and left for his parents’ home in Seeta.

 

This was his daily routine — to go to his mother, Zam Zawedde’s home for supper, before proceeding to his residence in Mulago, where he was staying alone. 

 

“He would first come home and eat supper. If he was late, we would pack it for him,” his sister, Jackie Ssaka, says. 

As he left his shop, Tamale was not aware that he was being trailed. When he arrived at his mother’s home, he parked by the gate and hooted for someone to open.

 

“Usually, there are children and a maid at home and they would rush to open the gate for him,” Ssaka says.

As Tamale waited, armed men came out of their hiding and shot him. It is believed that they opened the car and took a bag which contained some money, his identification card and a laptop. They left airtime worth sh100m in the car. Ssaka says it took them some time to realise that Tamale had been shot.

 

“After sometime, people rushed towards his car and found him bleeding profusely from the bullet wounds,” she says.

Among those who turned up was his mother. Tamale was first rushed to a local clinic, which referred him to Mulago Hospital because he was in critical condition and he had lost a lot of blood. He died on arrival at Mulago Hospital.

 

According to neighbours, strange men had been seen loitering around his mother’s gate the day he was shot. 

“We saw two strange men around the area, but we were not concerned. They even came and bought kikomando (chapatti and beans) from us for lunch,” says a chapati vendor, who operates a kiosk near the family home.

 

According to an eyewitness, the man who pulled the trigger was wearing a uniform of a private security company, Securicor.

According to the Police, Bosco Ogwang, a private security guard attached to Securicor, a private firm, had gone missing with a gun and it is suspected that the same gun could have been used to shoot Tamale.

 

The acting deputy Police spokesperson, Patrick Onyango, said preliminary investigations revealed that Ogwang signed for the gun for night duty at Mukono-Kayunga Teachers SACCO on the Mukono-Kayunga road. He, however, never reached his duty station.

 

The Police are not ruling out the possibility that the incident could have been planned. A highly placed source told Sunday Vision that although they were not ruling out robbery, they are also widening the investigation to include the possibility that Tamale could have been a victim of a family feud and the robbery may have been a cover-up to disguise the motive of the murder. 

 

The officer in charge of investigations in Mukono district, Henry Mugumya, said they received tips that the deceased had misunderstandings with some family members.

 

“Our investigations are going on, but we found interesting leads that this could have been the work of a family insider, who was not happy with the deceased and could have arranged for the murder,” Mugumya said. According to Hajji Ismail Mayanja, Tamale’s father and a resident of Kkungu village in Kiira Town Council, Wakiso district, the family had also received reports that the death could have resulted from a family wrangle.

 

“It is a bit shocking that people have started saying among us (family members), there could be someone who wanted him dead,” Mayanja says. 

 

Sources in the family say the deceased was involved in a property wrangle with some of his relatives.

“I distributed my property among my children to avert any future wrangles after my death. I gave out two acres of land to each of them. On top of that, I gave them liberty to either keep and develop the land or sell and do other businesses,” Mayanja says.

 

It is reported that some of the children were not contented with the share they were given and took the case to court.

Tamale was among those who were thought to have been favoured in the sharing of the family land.

 

One of Tamale’s family members, who preferred anonymity, suspects that Tamale’s death could be linked to management issues of a school that belonged to the family. 

 

“The school, located in Kalerwe, was first managed by Hajji Mayanja. After it failed to thrive, Mayanja put it under the administration of one of his wives, but she also failed,” says the family member.

 

Because he was an accounts graduate, Hajji Mayaja put the school under Tamale. During his tenure, he was able to close all the financial gaps that were being exploited by relatives and turned the school into a profitable venture.

 

Sources in the family say in the process, he stepped on so many people’s toes, including staff and workers who had exploited the financial loopholes to steal money from the school.

 

 

Zawedde says her son was calm and generous to everyone, and had no grudge with anybody. 

“Tamale had no girlfriend, no baby or wife that he could be killed because of love affairs.

 

“He would tell me that he was working in danger. Following the first attacks, we restricted Tamale from moving with big sums of money,” Zawedde says.

 

“My prayer is that the Police carries out its investigations in time and lets us know who was behind Tamale’s death,” Tamale’s father  says.

 

Nelson Mpande, Tamale’s brother, said he (Tamale) had received death threats at his workplace.

“Tamale was first given a bottle of soda which had poison and the security guard at the Ben Kiwanuka branch of Dembelyo Telecom, was his saviour. He refused him to take that soda and when it was examined, they realised it had poison in it,” Mpande says.

 

Tamale was also once robbed at the Mukono branch by robbers who connived with security guards at the shop on a Sunday evening in 2011. They put him at gun point and made away with over sh90m.

 

In that same year on another Sunday evening, security guards put Tamale’s driver at gun point and asked him to take them to his boss. With no option, the driver led them to Tamale’s office, where they stole over sh50m. That time, one of the guards was arrested, but he said other colleagues had already disappeared with the money to Gulu. 

 

“We did not know how the Police concluded this case,” Mpande says. 

Hajji Abas Mugerwa, another brother to Tamale, says after noticing how dangerous Tamale’s work was to his life, they tried to stop him from doing the same job, but he was determined.

 

Eventually, he accepted and was planning to go out of the country for another job. Sources in the Police believe that someone at Tamale’s workplace could have engineered the attack.

 

“It is possible that somebody who saw or knew the deceased’s nature of work and that he moved with money, could have planned the killing,” a source says. 

 

They believe that if it was the work of an insider, that person knew what time the deceased left on that day and alerted the killers in-wait at his mother’s gate.