Hajjara Nakitto, the heartbroken mother to a 15-year-old Amos Ssegawa who was shot dead by security forces in November says she was abandoned by Government after promises of helping her.
From her teenage son being shot dead, to being forced to exhume his body and later having to re-burry him at the family's own cost, the story of the mother who has only harvested tears from Uganda's political contests that she is not part of can melt the hardest of hearts.
Hajjara
Nakitto, the mother to a 15-year-old Amos Ssegawa killed in the November riots says
she was abandoned by Government after promises of helping her.
Although Nakitto
held her son close by as they fled the central business district of
Kampala that was full of chaos from gunshots and tear gas, Ssegawa did not survive a bullet to the mouth.
A
peaceful protest on Monday demanding to see Speaker of Parliament Rebecca
Kadaga but ended in a battle with police opened doors for Nakitto to
meet with Kadaga.
Nakitto
who today met the Speaker of Parliament in her boardroom alongside her husband
Meddie Semugenyi and their young daughter described how the family was abandoned
while she was going through the trauma and pain of the death of her child.
Nakitto
told Kadaga that the family had failed to get justice from police following the
death of their son Ssegawa who was a senior two student at Lubiri High School
(Buloba Campus).
She
narrated her traumatic experience after police made them exhume the body of their
son to carry out a post mortem report which would indeed confirm that her son succumbed to gunshot wounds.
She says that
they were made to incur reburial expenses and to date they have never received
justice for what happened. She says
after the death of her child, her life was messed up as she couldn’t work, and
lost all her savings on related expenses.
//Cue in:
Luganda “Naye ntambudde okumala…
Cue out:…ffuna
kuyambibwa kwona"//
Kadaga directed
police to trace for the security officer who shot Ssegawa using footage from
CCTV cameras installed in Kampala. She said the other Ugandans who innocently
died should also be accounted for and those responsible held accountable.
She has
also questioned the delay by the government to compensate families who lost loved
ones during the riots.
President
Museveni said the state would separate those who were innocently killed from
the rioters and the families of those innocently killed would be compensated.
Erasmus Twaruhukwa
the Director of Human Rights and Legal Services at Uganda Police who attended the
the meeting said that they had submitted all the names of the affected persons to
the Office of the President and all was being done to ensure they were compensated.
Kadaga
however, challenged him saying several people were not registered nor were
their contacts taken.
//Cue in:
“They were innocent…
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not taken”//
Ssegawa
is one of the 54 people who were killed in the two-day protests which erupted
in Kampala and other parts of Uganda following the arrest of presidential
candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine in Luuka District on November 18,
2020.
Alex Otto
Freelancer