Prime
NRM must revisit its service awards stand
Combo: Former Leader of Opposition, Mathias Mpuuga (L) and President Museveni (R)
What you need to know:
- The issue: Service awards
- Our view: NRM Parliamentary Caucus ought to act for the greater good.
It can be said with some certainty that the top organs of the ruling NRM party are invested in seeing to it that checks and balances, known to keep any democracy functioning, are short-circuited.
The party is working tirelessly and obsessively to ensure that a motion to start the censure of the four Parliamentary commissioners for sharing Shs1.7 billion from the taxpayer suffers a stillbirth.
At least this is the impression that even the uninitiated got when Brandon Kintu, the spokesperson of the NRM Parliamentary Caucus and Kagoma North lawmaker, featured on last week’s On the Spot talk show on NTV Uganda.
Mr Theodore Ssekikubo, who is doing public-facing duties for the censure motion proponents, was chastised for not exhausting the party’s dispute resolution platforms. The Lwemiyaga County lawmaker, who did not hold back, should be commended for exposing the weakness in such a deeply flawed argument.
The fact that an Opposition lawmaker joined three NRM members in partaking of the so-called service award gives the farce in its entirety “a national outlook”, Mr Ssekikubo opined. Yet if the grapevine is anything to go by, NRM lawmakers have been ordered by their Chief Whip, Mr Hamson Obua, not to support the censure motion pursuit even in the slightest.
The rumour, if confirmed, represents yet another low for the ruling party. This newspaper has always vouched for pluralism. Its rich rewards for democracy mean that we are not about to stop throwing our weight behind this time-honoured conception of power. The concentration of powers in a single individual is in many respects a recipe for disaster.
The devastating effects of cynically willing into existence an absence of a diversity of views is in fact well documented. As such, expecting the legislative branch of government to think and talk in lockstep with the executive is downright boneheaded. Yet this is precisely what the NRM Parliamentary Caucus is pining for per the recent submission of its spokesperson.
We balk at this prospect, and invite Ugandans across the political spectrum to do the same. The mistake is in imagining that singing out of the same hymn sheet will do us a world of good. It will not. It will instead limit options and rarely in ways that make our country democratic. Anything that still maintains a tiny glint of transparency in these dark times of secrecy has to be lauded.
It should not be lost upon us that the censure motion intends to lift a veil of secrecy on the rather expensive kasiimo or handshake as the fiscal space in our economy continues to tighten. If the recipients of the service award merited the pat they got on the back, considerable energies should not be spent trying to foreclose a discussion in the House as to what occasioned the same. The idea of trying to preclude an inquest into what occasioned the service award is absurd and unnecessary. It most certainly dedicates itself to the destruction of what checks and balances espouse—counterbalancing influences.
The NRM Parliamentary Caucus ought to act for the greater good. To it:, we pose one simple question: is going to great lengths to stop the censure motion process doing the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of individuals?
