Ever since corruption and nepotism scandals broke out at the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) a few weeks ago, there has been syndicated rumours insinuating that city businessman Rajiv Ruparelia is the one behind the explosion of the Commission’s chairperson Sylvia Muwebwa Ntambi’s woes resulting from a business deal gone bad between her and Rajiv.
The carefully choreographed ‘scripts’ purport that Rajiv allegedly fueled the Whistleblower to compile the above petition, as a way of settling a score with Ntambi.
The rumours point a picture before the unsuspecting audience that Ntambi is innocent, but only paying a price because there is an alleged bad blood between her and Rajiv ever since the latter purportedly refused to grant the Ruparelia Group a deal in which the Commission was supposed to rent office space at their Kingdom Kampala Building next to UBC.
It is reported that the row started in 2019 when the Equal Opportunities Commission, a government body established to fight discrimination and enforce compliance with legislation on equal opportunities, issued notices seeking service providers for office space.
Kingdom Kampala emerged the best-evaluated bidder in the bidding process, however, on January 29, 2020, the Commission wrote to Kingdom Kampala saying the procurement process was cancelled.
This sparked off a protest from the Ruparelias in multiple letters dated February 11 2020, and February 10 2020 respectively. On March 2 2020, the Ruparelias received a letter from the Commission saying “investigations were made into the complaint” and that it did not find any “justification to make corrective measures as required by law.”
The Ruparelias, according to their lawyer Nelson Walusimbi, “being aggrieved by the decision of the accounting officer consequently made a complaint to the PPDA which ruled in its favor on June 4 2020.”
But even after the ruling, Ntambi did not go ahead to endorse the deal and opted to procure office space from another company, however, we have learnt that Rajiv did not go ahead with pursuing the agreement and decided to move on, having smelt a dead rat in the whole process.
However, according to Rajiv, he was surprised and shocked recently to see his name being dragged into the EOC mess instead of Ntambi and her clique carrying their own cross, if any.
Meanwhile, we have also learnt that a whistle-blower sent a dossier to President Yoweri Museveni detailing all the scandalous acts Sylvia Ntambi has allegedly committed during her tenure at the commission.
According to the dossier seen by this website, Ntambi is accused among other allegations of promoting tribalism at the Commission causing government losses through dubious travel expenses and allowances, mismanaging the Commission by running it as if it is her own business among others.
