Rhino: Agencies – Sources from inside the Ugandan government office concerned with UN cooperation to deliver aid to Sudanese refugees in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, revealed that employees affiliated with the ‘Burhan’ government are trafficking in aid provided to Sudanese refugees.
Eram News quoted sources as saying that this trafficking is due to the control of these employees over the database of Sudanese refugees, through which the army issues identification papers that the UN programme relies on to disburse aid programmes to refugees in camps and camps spread for Sudanese in different areas in Uganda.
The sources confirmed that the Sudanese employees concerned with issuing these cards through the databases in their possession and assigned by the Burhan government, receive amounts as ‘bribes’ whose type and price are classified in exchange for issuing them to refugees on the same day, while those who do not have the money to pay the ‘bribes’ do not receive a copy of the identification papers until at least a month after submitting the request.
She added: ‘The price for issuing papers reaches $300 per person, and the price per person decreases with the number of family members.
The sources pointed out that identification papers should be issued to refugees who have lost their personal identity or similar papers for free, as UNHCR provides all the costs related to this work, including the wages of the Sudanese employees concerned with this matter who have the databases, but they work in isolation, refusing to have a regulatory framework for this process that disrupts the delivery of aid to entire camps for Sudanese refugees.
The sources said that the Ugandan government office, which is an intermediary and implementer of the UN programmes that are supervised by the Office of the Prime Minister in Uganda, requested that the work of the Sudanese government employees who possess the databases to issue documents for the disbursement of subsidies be under close supervision and follow-up, but the Sudanese Embassy in Kampala objected to this, considering it a kind of access to confidential information of the Sudanese state.
