5 painful years of Parliament

The outgoing House has had the biggest number of MPs in Uganda’s history – 333 -- but has it been a job well done for Uganda’s first multiparty Parliament, and should the voters return a similar 9th Parliament? Apparently not.

Despite its huge size, this has been the most toothless Parliament in exercising its constitutional oversight function. Damning committee reports especially on corruption were received by the right hand only to be thrown out with the left; corrupt ministers and MPs were strongly defended and monies were generously passed out in supplementary budgets.

Because of numbers, the ruling party boasting 215 MPs with voting rights against a paltry 59 for the opposition, any committee report against an NRM cadre would be rejected as malicious and politically motivated, and a Shs600 billion supplementary request would freely sail through no matter what the opposition said or what the electorate thought as happened on January 4.

In time, the opposition resorted to filibustering; storming out of Parliament, refusing to sign committee reports, encouraging prolonged debates on the floor, but all these seldom turned the tide of the ruling party’s subjective juggernaut.

For the NRM MPs, instead of representing their constituents or standing up for the national interest, they mainly worked hard to impress the President in the hope of getting ministerial posts or becoming blue eyed members of the system.

Whatever the Executive decided became the decision of the NRM parliamentary caucus, and subsequently the members on the floor of the House. In effect, Uganda has joined the notoriety of those countries where Parliament is a rubber-stamping facade.

And as veteran journalist and former legislator in the sixth Parliament Onapito Ekomoloit says, “there has been an increased virtual fusion of the Legislature and the Executive maiming Parliament’s role of ensuring checks and balances.”

This emasculation of the Legislature by the Executive and the huge numerical imbalance in favour of the ruling party reduced the 8th Parliament to a mere rubber stamp station to vouch for the desires of the Executive and sacrificed the search for public accountability and constitutionalism on the alter of the politics of “order from above and we are in things”.

Executive license
Parliament’s output on laws depends on the input from the Executive; and going by the number of Bills passed, motions received and committee reports handled, Parliament tried to deliver on its lawmaking role.

According to the Parliament Public Relations Office; of the 109 Bills brought to Parliament 80 were passed.

Most of the bills passed were those of interest to the Executive - a constitutional provision; but also many were in the interest of the NRM party and not of threat to influential politicians.

The Anti Money Laundering Bill, that would have checked illicit businesses and gambling, the Anti Counterfeit Bill, the Anti Homosexuality Bill, the Prohibition and Prevention of Torture Bill and the Electronic Transmissions Bill have since 2009 not gone past the first reading yet on the same day it was presented for second reading; the Emoluments and Benefits of the President, Vice-President and the Prime Minster Bill was taken through third reading.
Dr Fredrick Kisekka Ntale, a research fellow at the Makerere University Institute of Social Research says that for the past five years, the interest of bill origination has been a yardstick on how Parliament operates.
“If a President is interested in a particular bill, it will be worked on expeditiously, and if he is not, the cows will return home when it’s still at first reading stage.”
But Uganda’s problem is not the absence of laws and as the Deputy Speaker Rebecca Kadaga says, Parliament works on Bills as, and when they are brought by the Executive.

Record check
Although we may not fault Parliament on how many bills and motions they have handled, we may question MPs on their performance in terms of playing the oversight and representation role; soliciting views from the electorate and utilising them to contribute to motion framing and to bill framing.
Here, the performance of the 8th Parliament has left a lot to be desired.
The level of debate in the House has dropped to shocking depths. The great debaters in the House have either crossed to the ruling party where debate is gagged in the caucus, or have kept to themselves throughout
Unlike the robust 6th Parliament which the relative evidence shows stood up for good governance in the face of Executive impunity, very few of today’s directly elected MPs have been able to collect information from their constituencies and use it to secure or generate a line of debate - no matter the quality- towards a motion or use it in formulation of a Bill.
MP David Bahati- an occasional chair of the NRM caucus- defends such a miserable performance on the current political environment.
“The 6th Parliament operated in an environment [Movement system] where MPs were not bound by party decisions,” and that unlike in the United States, Uganda operates a system where MPs attach more priority to political party issues than constituency.
Probably a reason why, even though there is a provision of MPs visiting their constituencies every fortnight, some only go back when they are looking for re-election

Caucus evils
Although they are part and parcel of a multiparty dispensation; to help parties garner consensus and realise numbers and support during debates, the 8th Parliament’s political caucuses, especially the NRM caucus, have been reduced into rackets, they have specialised in organising MPs to reject damming corruption committee reports, support anything to do with the presidency and money, gag opposing party members and threaten them.

The 8th Parliament caucuses curtailed individual thinking and decision making and as Dr Kisekka says, members bowed to the interests of the top echelon and the thinking of the party chairmen.

Makerere University law don, Dr Oloka Onyango of the Human Rights and Peace Centre, says MPs need to take an own initiative not to caucus on personal but national issues.

In 2008 and 2009, instead of censuring, or suspending corrupt ministers; NRM MPs hid behind numbers and caucus decisions to ignore their oversight role and instead worked hard to throw out committee reports on the over Shs11 billion Temangalo and the Shs500b Chogm scandals – both of which implicated Security Minister and NRM secretary general Amama Mbabazi in suspected unlawful conduct.

Mr Bahati wishes Parliament would have done better on Chogm but concedes that MPs’ “mixed politics with accountability” and politics took precedence.

And that the failure to impeach corrupt officials was because the corrupt took the dirty business as a business and invested money to keep it ongoing.

“Party politics divides the fight against corruption because the corrupt hide behind the leadership.”

Although it will go down as a Parliament that nodded in approval to every Executive request especially the supplementary budgets, the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee set a precedent in exposing corruption cases. PAC, chaired by the Forum for Democratic Change’s Nathan Nandala Mafabi (Budadiri West), will be one of the very few redeeming bits when the sad story of the 8th Parliament is finally written.

A senior journalist familiar with the daily operations of the 8th Parliament throughout the entire five years says that compared to its predecessor, the 8th Parliament has been a disappointment.

At no time did government ever fail to use its power to muscle its way through Parliament. It has used the power of numbers to reduce the House to a laughing stock and turned Speaker Edward Ssekandi into a puppet. Not even filibuster-delaying tactics- by the opposition could prevent an NRM caucus decision from passing when Mr Ssekandi has been dancing in his seat.

The opposition many times looked on helplessly, sometimes walking out in protest at the very brazenness of things, as the speaker shed what should be a neutral position and actively sought to aid and abet the tyranny of the majority. His conduct during the land bill and Shs600 billion fiascos are some of the more recent pointers to his lamentable behaviour.