When Bassey Kibwika was diagnosed with cancer and needed urgent treatment in the United States, his daughter Lynn Kibwika believed his bank’s insurance would help pay the bill. She was wrong.
The Insurance Appeals Tribunal dismissed Lynn Kibwika’s appeal against Sanlam Life Insurance Limited and DFCU Bank, finding that her father was not entitled to a refund of the Shs 76 million she had borrowed from the US Embassy to cover his medical transportation costs.
The tribunal upheld the original decision of the Insurance Regulatory Authority’s complaints bureau, and ordered each side to pay its own legal costs.
The story started with Bassey Kibwika opening a Pinnacle current account with DFCU Bank. Pinnacle is a premium banking product, and one of its benefits was a Bankassurance arrangement with Sanlam, meaning that account holders were automatically eligible for a Group Life Insurance Policy.
The policy covered several benefits, including critical illness, death, hospital cash, and travel insurance. When Bassey was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in 2024, his daughter Lynn, acting as his lawful attorney, began making claims under the policy.
Sanlam paid out Shs 3.6 million as a critical illness benefit. But Lynn wanted more. She applied for Shs 76 million to cover the cost of transporting her father from Uganda to the United States for treatment.
That is where things started to fall apart.
The first problem was paperwork. Sanlam and DFCU both asked Lynn to provide her father’s passport details, travel dates, and his destination before they could process anything further.
She submitted an expired passport and said her father had no travel dates because his condition prevented him from flying commercially. She told Sanlam her father needed an air ambulance and that Sanlam had refused to pay.
At the hearing, she told the tribunal that her father could not travel alone, that getting a visa for a travel companion would have taken too long, and that the American Embassy had eventually helped them after Sanlam and DFCU refused to respond. She argued that the insurers were being obstructive and that the claim was a straightforward refund of costs already incurred.
Sanlam was represented by Horace Nuwasasira and Jimmy Kacha of Signum Advocates.
Susan Namulinda, Sanlam’s claims manager, told the tribunal that Lynn had not only submitted an expired passport, but had also given contradictory accounts of how her father travelled. She had initially told Sanlam Bassey needed an air ambulance, but he had in fact flown on a commercial airline.
Namulinda also told the tribunal that photographs existed showing Lynn at the airport with her father, contradicting her earlier claim that she had not escorted him. Sanlam’s position was that the policy excluded travel abroad for medical treatment, and the claim was not payable.
DFCU’s bancassurance claims manager, Derick Bukenya, told the tribunal that travel insurance for Pinnacle account holders did not even exist until late 2023, which is why it was not mentioned in the documents Bassey Kibwika received when he opened his accounts in early 2023.
Bukenya explained that travel insurance under the scheme was not automatic. He said a customer had to apply for it separately before travelling, providing travel dates, a destination, and valid passport details. Because none of that had been done, there was no travel insurance policy in place when Bassey Kibwika flew to America.
The tribunal agreed after examining the policy documents carefully. It found that the wording, which referred to eligible members qualifying for free travel insurance once every quarter, described an entitlement to apply for cover, not cover that already existed.
“The applicant was not covered, but was eligible to be covered,” the tribunal stated plainly in its ruling.
Then came the question of dual citizenship, which proved to be another fatal blow to the claim. In the account opening forms, Bassey Kibwika had recorded his nationality as Ugandan. The form contained a specific question asking customers to declare any other nationalities in the case of dual citizenship. He did not write anything in that space.
Her daughter, Lynn, had argued before the tribunal that her father was also an American citizen, and that this entitled him to be repatriated to the United States under the policy.
The tribunal was unmoved. Drawing on the insurance law principle of uberrimae fidei (utmost good faith), the panel found that Bassey had a legal duty to disclose his dual citizenship, especially since the form had directly asked for it.
“The citizenship and country of residence were material facts essential to determining the benefit of repatriation of the policyholder to their home country,” the tribunal ruled.
Having declared himself Ugandan, Bassey Kibwika could not then claim to be repatriated to America.
She tried to argue that her father had verbally told the bank about his American citizenship. The tribunal rejected that argument, citing sections 91 and 92 of Uganda’s Evidence Act, which provide that once information has been reduced to writing, oral evidence contradicting that document is not admissible.
There was another difficulty. A clinical report from St Francis Hospital Nsambya showed that Bassey Kibwika had originally been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2007 and had previously been treated in the United States.
So his 2024 diagnosis was technically a relapse of that earlier condition. The tribunal found that this made the cancer a pre-existing condition, which the policy explicitly excluded from cover.
With all three grounds stacked against her, the appeal collapsed entirely.
