House of deals: Parliament faces withering accusations of rampant corruption

“Undoubtedly, the strict measures implemented by the NRA have had unparalleled success in combating corruption in the past, earning the respect and trust of the masses. We, however, have been let down primarily by a few individuals responsible for financial matters, procurement, and the distribution of supplies and equipment,” Mr Museveni offered, adding, “The problem worsened when political leaders, particularly MPs, started paying themselves excessively, which diverted them from their primary responsibility of safeguarding the interests of the people they represent. We are now coming in directly to restore the NRA heritage. The young people, with their passion-driven outlook, and the victims of corruption have a chance to lead this effort.”

Caught in the shiver of excitement after watching what the youth in Kenya have been able to achieve, it remains to be seen what the yields of the “passion-driven outlook” of Uganda’s young people will look like. Chatter about a march to Parliament on July 23 in protest against fraudulent conduct by those in power keeps gaining in amplitude. 

Empirical evidence shows that, globally, no demographic cohort has seen more wind taken out of its sails by the cost-of-living crisis as the Zoomers or Generation Z. Born anywhere from 1997 to 2012, Zoomers have seen most, if not all, of their dreams and hopes take root in barren soil.

Largely written off as passive, a violent inner rage has flared in a great deal of them recently. And not just in Kenya. Zoomers in Uganda demonstrated an underlying outrage on online spaces when Speaker Anita Among claimed that funds pilfered by government bureaucrats eventually trickle down to your average ordinary person. 

The Speaker of Parliament made the comments—a stunning moral recalibration—at the backend of June during the launch of the Ssentaayi Development Foundation in Lwengo, whose District Woman Representative in Parliament Cissy Namujju, is incarcerated.

Ms Namujju and two other lawmakers—Yusuf Mutembeli (Bunyole East), and Paul Akamba (Busiki County)—stand accused of trying to extract a kickback from the Uganda Human Rights Commission during the budgeting process for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024/2025.

Fall from grace 
Only recently, President Museveni, apoplectic with rage, refused to sign the Appropriations Bill until more than Shs700 billion, which had been reallocated by lawmakers in this year’s financial budget, was reinstated. Before, the President joined many Ugandans in questioning the wisdom of expending north of Shs1 billion on a so-called service award for four backbench parliamentary commissioners. 

“I could have blocked the moves by the MPs to award themselves high salaries. I opposed [it] but did not block because it is not always correct to block everything you consider a mistake. It is better, sometimes, to oppose but also allow people to learn from their mistakes or for the issue at hand to be clearer,” Mr Museveni said at the recent Cabinet retreat in Kyankwanzi. 

The embarrassment of riches of Ugandan lawmakers continues to be greeted with horror and dismay by not just the impoverished country’s President but also the citizenry. The laundry list of perks the lawmakers receive includes a one-off vehicle allowance of Shs150m; a net salary of Shs6.1m; a housing allowance of Shs6.5m; a constituency support fee of Shs17.03m; as well as a town running fee of Shs1.945m. They also receive a fuel allowance of anywhere between Shs10.3m and Shs31m, as well as a free iPad and a Shs50,000 allowance for attending committee sessions, among others.

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Yet, with barely a year left towards the end of its term, the desecrated Eleventh Parliament is serving as a cautionary tale after its lawmakers became agents of quid-pro-quo deals with senior government officials to feather their nests.

How did Uganda’s Parliament, which in the past was a respected citadel against Executive overreach, turn into the poster child of graft? Mr Moses Khisa, an associate professor of Political Science at NC State University, USA, believes the buck stops with President Museveni.

“As Museveni’s regime has become rusty, the extent of transactional politics has become brazen. It’s an accumulation of decay, dysfunction and decline. Parliament is the centre of national politics. It’s where elite accommodation and compromises take place, it’s where quid-pro-quo is marshalled, and Museveni has always understood this very well, that’s why he ensures that the NRM maintains a super-majority,” he told Monitor.

Its genesis
This creeping hand of graft orchestrated by an intricately woven government syndicate began to seep across the hallowed grounds of the Seventh Parliament. The vice has not spared the Opposition, whose lawmakers chair oversight committees, including the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (Cosase), and the Local Government Accountability Committee, among others.

Many of these accountability committees created the perfect storm for graft as government officials implicated in corruption scandals used part of their stolen loot to bribe lawmakers tasked with an oversight role at the committee level. In turn, the lawmakers, including those in the Opposition used this smokescreen to pander to the gallery. This is because they used their powers to intimidate government officials implicated in graft reports to seek higher thresholds. 

How did Parliament, whose lawmakers during the National Resistance Council (NRC), the first Parliament of the National Resistance Movement government, drove Stout pick-up trucks as their official vehicles and only earned allowances—turn its hallowed grounds into an ostentatious display of nouveau-riche symbols?

Mr Gerald Karuhanga, who served as the Ntungamo Municipality MP in the Ninth and Tenth Parliament, said he witnessed the ‘ingenuity’ that sustained corruption at Parliament. 

“I was in the Public Accounts Committee and saw many ugly cases. Something told me that much of the rot is in the Budget Committee where heavily syndicated cartels I saw with my naked eyes operate,” he disclosed, adding, “The Budget Committee cleared the budgets of all the other committees, and it was so powerful that you could read between the lines that almost anything the Budget Committee chairperson pursued, could go through. For instance, a budget for a specific ministry could be passed in totality.”

Mr Karuhanga said the less-aggressive ministries would receive 70 percent of their budgets and this habit was largely perpetrated by heads of agencies and departments from ‘western Uganda.’ The lawmaker raised this matter on the floor of Parliament and personally pursued public interest litigation against graft.

“The chairperson of the Budget Committee could pursue this personally with promises after the Permanent Secretary of a ministry conducted a secret meeting with the chairperson. I reported these incidents of collusion, and it is on the record of the Hansard, but no action was taken, that is how some ministries, state agencies and parastatals received 100 percent of their budgets,” he told Saturday Monitor. 

Underhanded practices
Mr Karuhanga notes that there were various methods of receiving bribes and some of the cunning MPs physically received cash from those who wanted to conceal their dirty deals.   
“It was never one approach to receiving bribes. There was ingenuity when receiving this money. On one occasion, some unknown men showed up at Parliament in my office over the Lubowa incident and tried to offer me money, which I rejected,” he reveals, adding, “They were emissaries and I threatened them that they could be arrested. They apologised and told me they were shocked that I rejected the bribe money. I did not call the police because I believed that these men accessed Parliament through the connivance of the House security.”

The former Ntungamo Municipality lawmaker said it was usually during report writing when the cunning nature of MPs who had been compromised reared its ugly head. 

“The report was a stark contrast of what had been unearthed during the probe, and this was so shocking,” he discloses.

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Trips outside the country where MPs earn large amounts in allowances, have also been used to reward and punish allies in Parliament. Mr Karuhanga said this practice began during the Ninth Parliament, where the Speaker made the final decision on who could travel.  

In April 2020, Karuhanga triumphantly walked out of the Constitutional Court after suing his colleagues for a dubious payment of Shs10 billion, which was slashed from a Shs304 billion supplementary Covid-19 budget to their accounts. Each MP had received Shs20m for sensitisation campaigns in their constituencies. However, in a consent judgment by the Constitutional Court, they were ordered to refund the funds. 

“When I tried to raise it on the floor, some MPs threatened to assault me. A few MPs protected me. What encouraged me to challenge it in court was not just that isolated case,” he said, adding, “Sadly I noted that Parliament had turned into a deals workshop and was so overt in its corrupt practice.”

Mr Karuhanga posits that “this consistent pattern has bred a culture of self-aggrandizement. 
“For instance, the Covid-19 budget incident was so shocking when the chairperson, [Amos] Lugoolobi read that there was a gift for MPs when it had not been discussed at the Committee, which I was part of, then all of a sudden, a take-home of Shs20m was introduced,” he notes.

Mr Lugoolobi was subsequently appointed a junior Finance minister. In August 2023, High Court Judge, Margaret Tibulya, charged Mr Lugoolobi for contravening sections of the Anti-Corruption Act for the offence of diverting iron sheets meant for the vulnerable people of Karamoja Sub-region. 

A den of thieves?
Mr Karuhanga said he was shocked when these syndicates scaled what he thought was a robust Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS). One of the major graft incidents, he recalls, was captured in the Auditor General’s report for the FY 2014/2015.

The report raised accountability queries in the Local Government ministry. Mr Patrick Mutabwire, the acting Permanent Secretary then, was accused of diverting Shs12 billion meant to procure 111 vehicles for district chairpersons in the country.

Only Shs1.5 billion was spent. The rest was diverted to the Local Government ministry’s recurrent expenditure and doled out as staff field allowance. Mr Karuhanga said the PAC probed this matter and unearthed rot at the heart of the diversion.

“Commercial banks have CCTV that show how these syndicates work. About four staff members were interrogated from 10 am till midnight [by PAC lawmakers] and told us that they would pick up the money almost every week from the bank and hand it over to the accounting officer in tranches of Shs100m. We were surprised that some staff had field allowance days of 1,200 each, others 900 days and 800 days each in one calendar year, which has 365 days,” he recalled. 

Supreme Court Justice Irene Mulyagonja, who was the ombudsman at the time, on October 27, 2015, wrote to the Head of Public Service then, Mr John Mitala, and ordered the interdiction of Mutabwire on corruption allegations. Save for being replaced with John Walala, nothing became of Mr Mutabwire. 

Mr Karuhanga also recalled questioning a suspected budget allocation of Shs26 billion where Shs16 billion was doled out to the human resource empowerment vote and another Shs10 billion was for capacity building at the Finance ministry. All of this was presented in a 300-voluminous report. 

“If you were in a rush, you would miss these figures. I asked what is the difference between these two items was and the Finance ministry dropped the Shs16 billion vote. Capacity building and human resource development are quite good votes because the hotels usually get business and quickly provide accountability through invoices,” Mr Karuhanga reveals.

“Corruption in Uganda is like the bloodline of the ruling party. It has permeated every sector, all the ministries, departments, and agencies and sadly most of the population. When the Speaker changes, the workers at Parliament look at it from an ethnic lens,” Mr Karuhanga argues, mimicking the words of British author, Michela Wrong, who authored the book titled It is Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-blower, which is an eye-opening account of tribal rivalries, pervasive graft, and the rising anger of a prospect-less youth in Kenya. 

To which Khisa concurs, noting thus: “On Parliament and deals, I think the current state speaks perfectly to what Nelson Kasfir analyses in the book as ‘late-stage clientelism.’”

A lost innocence 
Mr Augustine Ruzindana, who served as the first Inspector General of Government under the NRM government, and later as the Ruhaama MP in the Sixth and Seventh Parliament, says there was modesty exhibited by Speakers such as James Wapakhabulo, Francis Ayume, and Edward Ssekandi.

The trio studied law at the University of Dar es Salaam, which was a bastion of Marxist political thought and anti-colonial revolutionary lore influenced by the works of Guyana scholar Walter Rodney, Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey, Algerian revolutionary leader Frantz Fanon and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army leader, John Garang, among others. The trio’s depiction of statecraft was premised on modesty, argues Ruzindana.

Ruzindana says corruption was hardly detected in the Sixth Parliament, which censured two ministers—Sam Kutesa and Jim Muhwezi—on allegations of corruption. 

“During the Sixth Parliament, there was good faith, you wouldn’t detect seeking favours. [MPs] were concerned with institutional building. We set up the remuneration structure of Parliament, and there was no sitting allowance for chairing a Committee of Parliament or attending plenary.

We had laid the groundwork that committee and plenary work were substantive duties of MPs,” the former ombudsman discloses, drawing a parallel with recent times where Committee chairpersons get a monthly stipend believed to be Shs2m.

Mr Ruzindana says vibrant associations like the Young Parliamentarians Association (YPA), which led the moral crusade against graft, were established through “our own pockets.” 

He adds: “Even being a minister was not lucrative. An amendment was made for a minister to earn a paltry allowance.”

He says the government negotiated with a vehicle company to purchase vehicles for MPs on a loan scheme whose interest was 12 percent. This was hardly the riches of embarrassment of today where a one-off vehicle allowance of Shs150m keeps a stark and undeniable injustice in the public eye. Per Ruzindana, the point of inflexion came during the Seventh Parliament. 

“The habit that crept up was the policy paper conference with the relevant committee where MPs were paid allowances. We advised against it, but we failed to halt this practice,” he recalls.

Mr Ruzindana says he detected corruption at the Finance ministry as the ombudsman. “There was a racket that could send the pension to the wrong place. It would then be resent back through the connivance of government officials and shared.”

It was during the Seventh Parliament that reports emerged that a trio of lawmakers had attempted to extort funds from a businessman. These allegations were not proven. During the Seventh Parliament, it was also agreed that Committee chairpersons be paid a lump sum allowance of Shs500,000 per month.  

“For instance, I stood in as the chairperson of the Budget Committee for [Beatrice] Kiraso when she went to study at Harvard University and did not earn any allowance,” he told Monitor.

Mr Ruzindana, who served as the deputy Secretary General of FDC, says during the five-year term of the Seventh Parliament, he only travelled twice outside the country to Cuba and Mozambique. He also recalled that the House Parliamentary Commission’s role was not remunerated. 

Mr Mathias Mpuuga, the immediate past Leader of Opposition in Parliament, has been pilloried for receiving Shs500m as a service award as a commissioner. Fellow commissioners, including Ms Esther Afoyochan, Mr Solomon Silwany, and Ms Prossy Akampurira, also received Shs400m apiece. 

Will the penny drop? 

Speaking recently at the Cabinet retreat, President Museveni made a pitch for modesty, noting that “the excuse of low pay should be rejected.”

He added: “The corruption we are facing now has got two dimensions. One is the stealing of government money—taking bribes from the public to provide government services, misusing the procurement procedures to cheat the state, and corruptly handling personnel issues e.g. nepotism and selling government jobs […] The other dimension of corruption is employee dishonesty in a private company.”

The House Commission is in the spotlight for hiring relatives and cronies of the senior leadership and lawmakers in coveted staff roles at Parliament.

“Today, the job of an MP is an investment, in this type of situation, it becomes difficult to carry out the oversight role,” Mr Augustine Ruzindana, who served as the first Inspector General of Government under the NRM government, notes.

His comments mirror the decadent grassroots and constituency politics, which has been commoditised where a seat of Parliament is sold to the highest bidder who ‘immediately seeks to recoup the investment after his election, through extortion.’ 

The other ugly offshoot of the commercialisation of politics is that lawmakers join Parliament when they are heavily indebted. They are consequently made vulnerable to a cartel of shylocks, who reportedly extend loans to them on generous terms on account that they do the lender’s bidding.

Probably the greatest disappointment is that the proverbial penny is yet to drop. When lawmakers recently returned from recess to address corruption tendencies around the budgeting process, the House Speaker instead prodded them to be one’s “brother’s keeper” just as when she made a stopover in Lwengo. 

If it is any consolation, not every lawmaker is living in denial. Speaking on the floor of Parliament during that special sitting, Jonathan Odur (Erute South) offered thus: “The strongest justification for not sending this Bill to the Budget Committee is that there is a very serious allegation of grave corruption of the Budget Committee […] the wording of the President’s letter specifically mentions allegations of corruption.”

He added: “[The President] isn’t [raising the red flag] for the first time. When he came to pay tribute to the late Cecilia Ogwal, he accused Parliament of being corrupt. When we went to [the] State of Nation Address, he said that. On Budget Day, he said that. And in the letter, the accusation is on all members of the Budget Committee.”

What they say

Mr Gerald Karuhanga, who served as the Ntungamo Municipality MP in the Ninth and Tenth Parliament: I was in the Public Accounts Committee and saw many ugly cases. Something told me that much of the rot is in the Budget Committee where heavily syndicated cartels I saw with my naked eyes operate. The Budget Committee cleared the budgets of all the other committees, and it was so powerful that you could read between the lines that almost anything the Budget Committee Chairperson pursued, could go through. For instance, a budget for a specific ministry could be passed in totality.”

Mr Moses Khisa, an Associate Professor of Political Science at NC State University, USA: As Museveni’s regime has become rusty, the extent of transactional politics has become brazen. It’s an accumulation of decay, dysfunction and decline. Parliament is the centre of national politics. It’s where elite accommodation and compromises take place, it’s where quid-pro-quo is marshalled, and Museveni has always understood this very well, that’s why he ensures that the NRM maintains a super-majority.

Mr Augustine Ruzindana, who served as the first Inspector General of Government under the NRM government: During the Sixth Parliament, there was good faith, you wouldn’t detect seeking favours. [MPs] were concerned with institutional building. We set up the remuneration structure of Parliament, and there was no sitting allowance for chairing a Committee of Parliament or attending plenary. We had laid the groundwork that committee and plenary work were substantive duties of MPs