Parliament state mirrors condition of Museveni’s rule

Last week, I noted the evidently exaggerated and indefensible financial claims that Members of Parliament (MPs) make for trips abroad, ostensibly to attend workshops, trainings or conferences. Earlier in the week, a new bunch of documents dumped on Twitter showed payments to individual staff of parliament, many upwards of half a billion dollars, supposedly for donations and outreach activities by the Speaker.  

Payments made to bank accounts of individual staff, and the withdrawal of huge sums of money, done in the name of the Speaker of Parliament, violate the law that came out of that very parliament! To get a sense of where we are, we need to step back a bit in time. For most of the first two decades of President Museveni’s rule and his National Resistance Movement, parliament held a central place in Uganda’s governing landscape. It was in parliament where major national debates and thoughtful deliberations occurred. 

Up until at least the mid-2000s, parliament had in its ranks among the most competent and credible national leaders, progressive in thought and persuasive in argumentation. Individuals seen as prospective presidential material for the country were in parliament, from Speaker James Francis Wapakhabulo, and his successor Francis Ayume, to the opposition side of Norbert Mao, Cecilia Ogwal and Jacob Oulanyah, among others.  Even among the military, some of the most articulate and intellectually astute individuals were in parliament: a young Lt Noble Mayombo, a member of the Constituent Assembly and MP in earnest in 1996 rose rapidly to the rank of Brigadier by 2005, Gen Mugisha Muntu and Gen David Tinyefuza too were in parliament. 

To be Speaker of Parliament required a certain level of both political gravitas and intellectual prowess. Even at her lowest moments leading the House, the very last of that generation of NRM leaders in Ms Rebecca Kadaga nevertheless retained some level of credibility and respect. 

Today,  the leadership of parliament is utterly bereft of the savviness and sophistication needed to manage the second most powerful branch of government.  Overly diluted by the insane number of MPs, some representing constituencies of less than 50,000 people, and dominated by individuals incapable of articulating national issues, parliament would be considered a potential site of massive financial crimes if we were a country of laws.  

We cannot treat in isolation the decay and dysfunction so evident in parliament, where MPs make financial claims so fraudulent on the face and a Speaker spends billions on donations and questionable community activities. Rather, it is the overall system of rule quite emblematic of a rusted regime that has clearly run its course. 

If Mr Museveni still had any ambitions of running a government with some basic accountability, and where critical investigative arms and agencies of the state functioned independently and competently, given the damning cache of documents seen in recent weeks, criminal summons would have been sent to parliament. 

It hasn’t happened and is unlikely to, precisely because it is not just parliament. As I have belaboured to underscore here, the entire governmental system in Uganda today, including the branch of government supposed to dispense justice – the judiciary – is fully sucked in and saddled with corruption or at a minimum rendered dysfunctional.  

There is pretty much nowhere to look, not even to the Auditor General or the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, independent state institutions on paper, for action that can restore some semblance of accountability and getting answers for wrongdoing. 
As openly public actors playing in the political arena, MPs are easy to scrutinise and we easily can see the financial wrongs they are engaged in even if we can’t see all. But who knows what goes on in the walled spaces of government bureaucracy and fortified arenas of powerful actors, including security and intelligence, across government agencies and bodies? 

If we go by lessons of history and comparative perspectives, the kind of endemic and egregious corruption we see in Uganda today is a manifestation of a system that has matured and on the brink of disintegration. I don’t venture into prediction, but it is difficult not to see this happen in the near future and with disastrous implications in an already precarious socio-political and economic environment.
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