Police in Kabale District have come under fire from Central Division authorities over allegations that some officers are illegally collecting night parking fees from truck drivers who park in Kigongi Ward, Kabale Municipality.
In 2015, Kabale Municipal Council banned trucks from parking in the town centre, displacing several truck drivers who had been affected by the ongoing construction of the Mbarara-Kabale-Katuna road.
For several years, hundreds of transit trucks transporting goods to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda had been parking in front of shops and hotels in Kigongi Ward as drivers sought to avoid congestion at the Katuna border.
The municipal authorities subsequently banned truck parking in the town centre to protect the newly constructed Kabale-Katuna road from damage caused by heavy vehicles. Since then, truck drivers have not been allocated designated parking spaces in the town centre.
However, the newly elected Central Division Chairperson, Henry Nasasira, says that upon assuming office in June 2026, he engaged the Uganda National Roads Authority-UNRA and police to seek permission to reintroduce night parking as a source of revenue for the division, but the initiative hit a snag.
Nasasira says the division previously collected more than 12 million shillings annually from truck parking fees, revenue that helped improve service delivery to the community.
He says he was therefore dismayed to receive reports that some police officers were allegedly charging truck drivers between 10,000 and 20,000 shillings per night for parking near the police playground, despite the division being responsible for managing the area.
Nasasira adds that the trucks leave behind heaps of garbage, which the division must clear at its own expense, yet it does not receive any of the alleged parking fees collected from the drivers.
He says the division is also responsible for ensuring security, cleanliness and public welfare in the parking area, raising concerns over why it should bear the costs without benefiting from the revenue.
CUE IN……NASASIRA ON PARKING FEES RR/ENG…//
However, the Kigezi Regional Police Spokesperson, SP Nelson Tumushime, has dismissed the allegations as baseless.
Tumushime says police only provide security to division authorities during revenue collection exercises and do not collect revenue themselves.
He has, however, urged the aggrieved division authorities to file a formal complaint with police to allow investigations into the allegations and establish the facts.
CUE IN……TUMUSHIME ON PARKING FEES…. RR/ENG…//
