Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
The legislative branch of government, in our case called the national parliament, is arguably the most important pillar of any society that runs on a modestly sound democratic system. It is the legislature, parliament, which truly represents society in all its diversities and dimensions. It is the citadel, the people’s house, representing the aspirations, desires and interests of the public.
Parliament is not just the foremost pillar of procedural democracy whereby the people choose their leaders and representatives, it is also parliament that is charged with ensuring substantive outcomes by way of actual public goods and services through oversight, supervision and especially budgetary allocations and approvals.
This duty of parliament is as important as its other core task of drafting, debating, and deciding laws under which the executive branch, headed by the president, operates and the basis for dispensing justice through the judicial branch.
The above few lines don’t do justice to emphasising just how critical and consequential a parliament is meant to be in a functioning democratic system. Now, pretensions aside, Uganda does not run on a democratic system, whatever measure and metrics one uses.
Ours is patently an authoritarian system with sprinklings of democratic motions and a façade of institutions of democracy but which are trumped and subordinated to powerful individual and private interests.
Even then, one holds out faith and retains the hope that the people’s house can maintain some appearance of representing the public interest and defending the common good for society. This is a house of more than 500 men and women in a country of less than 50 million people.
Sometime back in this column, I attempted a systematic and comparative breakdown of numbers, taking a few other countries and their levels of parliamentary representation, factoring in population size and size of the national economy visa-vi size of the legislature; it is hard to find many countries as over-represented as Uganda. With our population and economy, a reasonable and appropriate parliament would be no more than 200 Members of Parliament, MPs.
A bloated parliament is bad enough, especially considering little value added to a better-governed Uganda. That is not all, in fact perhaps not the worst bit. Rather, it is the financial malfeasance, the sheer abuse of the very public funds MPs are elected to ensure are used prudently to serve the public interest.
As part of their core job, MPs scrutinise and ultimately pass or reject budgetary proposals for spending by different government ministries, departments, agencies, and other public bodies. They also decide their own budget; no oversight body scrutinises and vetoes their budget!
Their remuneration and perks don’t compare with those of most public officials.
But matters get even more egregious and utterly upsetting. If you look at some of the financial documents of MPs making claims for trips abroad that recently appeared on Twitter, it is scandalous bordering on the criminal.
An MP claims to have attended a 32-day workshop in Dar es Salam for which they claimed a staggering Shs115 million in daily per diem. A workshop that lasts over a month, more than a third of a school term, has to be something special, out of this world.
Another MP purports to have attended a two-week conference in London. It is highly unlikely any serious international conference, regardless of what it is about, can last longer than one week, and Entebbe to London is a one-day trip.
From what we have gleaned from Twitter documents in the recent past, these kinds of incredible financial claims and outrageous spending sprees appear to be quite common and normal among MPs and the leadership of parliament.
In recent weeks and months, a lot of agitation and anger was directed at Matthias Mpuuga, the MP from Masaka and until recently the Leader of the Opposition and a senior member of the National Unity Platform party. I refrained from commenting on Mpuuga’s case because of a conflict of interest: he is a friend I have known for many years and who I deeply respect.
At any rate, in the sea of official financial abuses and outright heists that are all over the place, both in parliament and the executive branch, it smacks of double standards and selective scrutiny to single out Mpuuga for crucifixion. Mpuuga may have taken Shs500 million, but it appears many MPs too make obscene per diem claims that can’t stand a cursory audit process.
Worse, we have a Speaker of Parliament, presiding over brazen spending of otherwise meagre public funds in a country lacking very basic services such as a functioning hospital, where schools have no classrooms and simple scholastic supplies, no water, no food. It gets utterly annoying to know that the Speaker, and Deputy Speaker, have budget lines for clothes, shoes and beddings! What? How? Why? Where is the sense of shame and moral campus?
