Want to sneak money through Parliament? Let’s talk about sex

So you pay each MP Shs5 million – at Shs2 billion, it is only two per cent of your Shs128 billion jackpot – to go out and consult and fulminate with their constituents.

Experts in guerrilla warfare will tell you that in order to attack an entrenched enemy position, it helps to create a diversion or a distraction. The bigger the distraction the more likely you are to get the enemy to pay attention to it, allowing you to attack the real target with a higher probability of success.

Sometimes the distractions are self-made, such as an election that allows you to raid the Treasury while everyone is away campaigning. In other cases you need to create the distraction yourself.

So what do you do when you need Parliament to approve a supplementary budget for State House of Shs128 billion? How do you deal with the fact that the amount is more than twice the original approved figure? How do you get approval for the money when the government is struggling to raise money to pay teachers’ salaries?

You guessed it; you create a distraction in Parliament. And for a really big distraction, you need to get the MPs to talk about something they are passionate about, such as sex.

So you introduce the Marriage and Divorce Bill, one that has failed to pass through Parliament in 47 years, and which has been gathering dust on the shelves since 2009 when it was last tabled.

As expected, a Bill that talks about sex is bound to get hormones racing and tongues wagging in Parliament. MPs who yawn with disinterest when government announces plans to scrap an agricultural project key to their constituency development, suddenly become animated and vocal at the sound of the words “cohabitation” or “marital rape”.

The August House is overnight transformed into the ‘MPlayboy Mansion’, with the walls of its inner chamber covered in the dirty, sweaty, energetic funk of chauvinistic testosterone and feministic adrenaline in a political Battle of the Sexes.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” they scream at one another, playing with the pun the way dogs play with bones, a cold sweat dripping down the backs of some whose public proclamations, at odds with the reality of their domestic arrangements, earn them an earful – or worse – when they return to the real Masters of the Home.

You know the Bill is a non-starter but you need to spread the fire, the angst; the peasants must be given some sense of power; a chance to froth at the mouth. So you pay each MP Shs5 million – at Shs2 billion, it is only two per cent of your Shs128 billion jackpot – to go out and consult and fulminate with their constituents.

Even if it is your own Bill that was debated and passed in Cabinet, you also add your clever rhetoric to the voices of reason, calling for calm and warning against upsetting traditional values.

By this time the rent-a-quote religious leaders, afraid to speak about the real issues of the day, or closeted by allegations that they cross bones as often as they make the sign of the cross, will have joined the fray, issuing forth scripture-lined proclamations, hopping from one radio station to another, and trying to look serious and holy for the cameras.

If you feel signs of the opium wearing off, you might consider introducing another hare-brained sex-related Bill, such as one that proposes a ban on the wearing of miniskirts.

By this point you will have the moralists riding their white horses and wagging their fingers at the Marriage and Divorce Bill while the liberalists will be strutting their short skirts and daring anyone who is man enough to dare touch their flesh without suffering grievous bodily harm by repeatedly knocking their heads into the business end of six-inch high heel shoes.

That is the point at which, like a thief in the night, you sneak your State House Supplementary Budget request into Parliament. You do not need to worry about the ‘MPigs’; they are busy grunting at the feeding trough over whether or not to return the Shs5 million maize bran, neither do you have to worry about the Finance Minister who pledged to end supplementary budgets last June; she is too busy negotiating aid reinstatement with donors and trying to fill the black hole in the next budget.

There might be one or two newspaper articles that expose the scheme for what it is but you need not worry much about that either; the elites are too busy sharing jokes on Whatsapp to read boring newspapers, the peasants are busy warning their MPs to leave their women and men alone and to go shove the Bill in a dark place, and the critical radio talk shows were all shut down a long time ago.

dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki