I challenge Opposition MPs to return that money

Your story of July 23 titled ‘MPs car cash could buy 7.5m vaccines’ , took my mind to the realm of the absurd. I got convinced that human beings have two conflicting and competing impulses either to live by rules, morals, and common decency moral or instinctively to gratify their immediate primeval desires.
There is always tension between rational and emotional reactions and between morality and immorality. What we are witnessing in Uganda where the MPs have pocketed car cash (from taxpayers) amidst Covid-19 pandemic and death represents human transgression from what God’s moral law and righteous conduct.
Debates are raging on radios and TV by the Chris Baryomunsis and Ofwono Opondos of this word justifying the Shs200 million  for MPs forgetting that this would have been the right  time for the honourables to forgo the money and buy 7.5 million vaccines and prove a case!
How can the Opposition MPs keep quiet? They are equally greedy. They fought tooth and nail to go to Parliament and earn money like their counterparts in the ruling party. How can a clique of people who are not necessarily poor get this money to buy cars at this moment in time? I am not cynical and I can swear in the name of God that the so-called MPs are not also safe from Covid- 19! This plague is everyone’s business! The disease is not discriminative, it is transparent and wields its sword and smites ministers, MPs, professors, doctors, peasants, babies and the destitute.
The masses must never accept the lie that the Opposition can offer any alternative to the ruling group. The Opposition is equally greedy and culpable. They have accepted the money to buy cars because that is what took them to Parliament like their counterparts! What are cars to a human soul? I challenge the Opposition to return that money. Let the leader of the Opposition lead his group to return the money to the Treasury.
The solution out of this Covid-19 quagmire is the government to declare an emergency. Large sections of Ugandans cannot fully conceptualise SOPS because of indiscipline, illiteracy and fatalism. The government should divert a big portion of the budget to buy Covid-19 vaccine and vaccinate 50 per cent of Ugandans. (It is only vaccination which can save the country from peril) and  cut wasteful expenditure, stop payment of super salaries to the privileged few: ministers, MPs, heads of department, government agencies etc and save the money for the Covid-19 fight.
This is like a war situation and we are all under siege by an invisible deadly enemy. The country should patiently wait for a post-vaccination period to open the economy, schools and tertiary institutions.
Robert Kyaligonza (PhD) Former lecturer