The law provides for funding of eligible parties by government

At any time of the day there is a meeting, a workshop, seminar or conference going on somewhere in the world on any issue imaginable. For example, the bigger boys were in Japan meeting to fundraise for Afghanistan, as they approach the exit schedules for the end of their large scale military presence, so that it does not look as if they are abandoning that country without making arrangements for its survival. Without much ado, they agreed to collect from among themselves a princely sum of $16 billion, never mind the reports of some amount of economic turmoil in the backyard of some of the countries participating in the meeting in Japan. Some other big boys were in a London Summit on family planning and related matters such as contraception, fertility rates, unintended pregnancy, size of families and development in the world. To put women back on the world agenda, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, the host of the summit, offered about $800 million for Third World Family Planning Services. Other meetings were taking place on the bailout of Spanish banks, as Greece continued to make noise about its strangling austerity bailout terms. Meanwhile in Egypt, the stage for a confrontation has been set by the new President who re-instated the newly elected Parliament that had been dissolved by the military on the orders of the Supreme Court, which has immediately restated its position on the unconstitutionality of the elections of the parliament, meaning that the parliament should remain dissolved. It looks as if the prospects of stability in Egypt may depend on how ready the main players may be willing to work out compromise arrangements.

On my part, I have been in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, most of this week attending a conference of 11 countries on political party financing models and regulations, with specific focus on state funding experiences of various countries. Most people in Uganda may not know that in other countries the state officially funds political parties from the government budget. Ugandans are rather used to seeing, hearing or reading about some officials unofficially helping themselves to the inexhaustible well of public funds. However, world over, there are quite a number of funding eligibility criteria ranging from mere registration to representation in elected legislative bodies at national and/or sub-national levels or to just participation in elections or on the threshold of a minimum number of votes or seats received in the previous general elections. For example, in South Africa there is a Represented Political Parties Fund which, in the current budget, received about SA Rand 92 million of which 10 per cent is divided equally to all parties represented in the National Assembly and Provincial legislatures and 90 per cent is divided according to seats received by each party in the last elections (South Africa has a proportional representation system in which the proportion of seats is equal to proportion of votes received). In Tanzania, the fund for political party funding is equal to 2 per cent of the recurrent expenditure less amount payable in defraying the national debt.

Disbursement of 50 per cent of the subvention is on the basis of the party seats as a ratio of all parliamentary constituencies and the other 50 per cent on the total party votes as a ratio of all parliamentary votes cast in an election. In addition to the 2 per cent, some other subvention is given on the basis of party representatives in district or urban councils.

Here in Uganda, we have a law, Section 14A of the Political Parties and Organisations (Amendment) Act, 2010, which provides for the use of government public funds for political party activities for the purposes of elections and normal day-to-day activities of political parties represented in Parliament. The formula supposed to be used is that in respect of elections, eligible parties shall be financed on equal basis, while in respect of normal day-to-day activities, government funding should be based on the numerical strength of each political party in Parliament. The important points to note are that, unlike in other countries, our law does not specify how much money government should allocate to political parties and actually so far, government has not appropriated any money for funding eligible political parties.

Mr Ruzindana is a former IGG and former MP.

a_ruzindana@yahoo.com