Use Tuesday's emergency sitting to correct budget, MPs told

Lawmakers have been encouraged to use Tuesday’s emergency parliament sitting to address erroneous allocations in the FY2024-25 budget as the House convenes to reinstate Shs750billion at the request of the executive.

Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group (CSBAG) executive director Julius Mukunda denounced the reallocations saying “they don’t have a direct impact on citizens.”

Last week, parliament Speaker Anita Among summoned legislators from recess after President Museveni refused to sign the Appropriation Act 2024, a law authorizing public expenditure from the Consolidated Fund’s Shs30.314 trillion to meet the expenditure for the year ending June 30, 2025, and to appropriate the supplies granted by parliament.

Museveni objected the Act following a decision by MPs who on May 16, while passing the FY2024-25 Shs72trillion budget, made reallocations without the Executive’s knowledge.

“MPs should discuss and completely remove erroneous expenditures that do not add value to the citizens at all,” Mukunda told journalists in Kampala on Sunday.

Proposed reallocations include Shs30billion for  for emoluments of cultural leaders, Shs8billion for procurement of iron sheets, maize seeds, and ox-ploughs, Shs2billion in the ministry of Luweero for supporting families with income-generating projects, Shs450m for house rent of the chief justice and principal judge, Shs17.2billion for arrears of tea seedling farmers, Shs8.93billion for medical insurance of MPs and parliamentary staff and Shs20billion for reinstatement of the budget cut for the office of the President and acquisition of land for industrial park in Kibaale worth Shs700m, among others.

“If you are a cultural leader and you can’t maintain yourself, then you don’t deserve to be a cultural leader. As for Shs8billion for iron sheets, maize seeds, and ox ploughs. We still have a court case where people have taken Karamoja iron sheets,” Mukunda observed.

He noted that the parliament did not have enough time to scrutinize the budget and citizens were not consulted which could have created an opportunity for irregularities in the approval process.

The return of this Bill, he said, however, poses a risk of delaying the implementation of critical government programmes.

“The fear of government agencies committing themselves will increase our biggest challenge of implementing the budget on time, but also, within the available resources,” he remarked in Kampala.

He added: “We commend President Museveni for bringing back the budget for because we believe that this could also be an opportunity to remove some of the unnecessary expenditures in the budget.”