Rebel MPs can do a lot more good if they just so choose

No one seems willing to tampdown the rhetoric. The NRM is now threatening to expel its small but intrepid squad of loudly critical members. Rebels, they are popularly called.

One of the rebels, MP Muhammad Nsereko of Kampala Central, has fired back declaring he will not support President Museveni in 2016. That in itself is interesting. For Mr Nsereko, it is a given Mr Museveni will run again, and again. Could that partly be the source of frustration amongst the rebels – having one man at the top, hogging all the power with no end in sight?

One senses, though, a whiff of contempt for The Boss in the MP’s declaration. It has come to that.
National politics today is full of mistrust and excitement. Mistrust is fuelling the excitement. I like the promise of the rebels because, God knows, NRM could do with some heavy internal debate to nudge it along the path of meaningful reform. The party is presiding over generalised bureaucratic incompetence and mind-bending levels of theft of public money. If the rebels are going to be true Young Turks – as they obviously would like to be regarded –they will have to recalibrate. Acting cartoonish by, for example, naming a “backbench Cabinet” as rebel Theodore Ssekikubo did in July is not the way to do it.

Neither is their habit of lurching from this issue to that issue.Today it is money for striking teachers, the other day it is holding up the budget over money for health workers, then bribery in the oil sector, on to disrupting the plenary over the main oil bill. And, of course, there is the Nebanda death. Running from issue to issue would not be a problem – after all populism is politics. It is a problem only because of the incoherence and obstinacy of the actors. The Executive has been both incoherent and obstinate in its positions on oil and power. The louder elements in Parliament – the ruling party rebels and the entire opposition MPs – have been even more incoherent and obstinate. The result is the mistrust we see.

MP Nebanda’s sudden death brought all the ugliness to the fore. Of course, the police did not help anything when very early on it attributed her death to narcotics consumption. Without even reflecting on it, the MPs asserted the government “had a hand” in the death. Nothing, apparently, will change that view. Assertions are, however, just that: Assertions. Just because you loudly and repeatedly assert something – with feigned seriousness, I must add – does not make it factual.

The mood is catching on even at the highest levels of Parliament. It was extremely rich for the Speaker, the number three citizen in the country no less, to proclaim she was “not content” with the government report on the MP’s death. In this wild and excited movement back and forth, it is difficult for an observer to discern a credible rebel strategy, if one exists. It is excellent that the ruling party rebels, all 10 or so of them, are working with the opposition. They need to do more, however.

They need to grow their numbers within their own caucus, which is so large no serious reforms can happen in government, and indeed the country, without more NRM MPs seeing the light. Signing of the petition to recall Parliament from recess for a special sitting over Nebanda’s death has exposed rebel weaknesses. Only a handful of ruling party MPs signed on.

It is the independents and the opposition that provided all those signatures. That there are even accusations that some signatures were forged shows up Parliament further as a house that is leaking, despite what some of us initially thought was a marvellous structure.

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com