Mpuuga’s Shs500m service award and Uganda’s different value systems

Former Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LOP), Mr Mathias Mpuuga Nsamba, has for the last fortnight or so been in the eye of the storm over his acceptance of a Shs500m one off “service award” from the Parliamentary Commission.

The heat has been turned on from mostly his own party, the National Unity Platform (NUP), whose leader, Mr Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine, issued a statement giving 10 reasons why the award was an act of corruption and abuse of office.

“It was both illegal and immoral, no matter how many heavy words are used to justify it. The moral thing for him to do would be to apologise to the nation and step down from the Parliamentary Commission. That remains his choice,” Mr Kyagulanyi wrote.

Mr Mpuuga has resisted calls to step down saying they were “based on falsehoods and terrible misappropriation of facts including basic ones” adding that he will not acquiesce to what he termed as “the cowardly call” to resign “based on spite, and deliberate misrepresentation for mischievous reasons”.

However, in rejecting the calls to quit the Commission, he threw veiled barbs at Mr Kyagulanyi, whose leadership credentials and style he question albeit in a subtle manner.

Mr Mpuuga also alluded to the existence of “small-group- family interests”; the party being “managed without transparency” and; “general mistreatment of other leaders”, adding that he will “not stop raising important questions on the actions, motivation and direction of different actors in the party”.

Questions
He did not name who was part of the “small-group-family” or what short of questions he had been raising, but within moments of his issuance of that statement of defiance, a document started circulating on social media indicating that Mr Kyagulanyi and members of his family were financially benefitting from the party in a not so legal or moral manner, the same crimes that Mr Mpuuga stands accused of.

The document alleges that Mr Mpuuga had been asking, among other things, why Barbie Itungo, the wife of Kyagulanyi, is allegedly a signatory to the party’s accounts; Mr Kyagulanyi’s alleged monthly salary of Shs100m; the salaries going to his brother Mr Fred Nyanzi and other relatives; alleged monthly rent of Shs200m NUP pays for occupying Mr Kyagulanyi’s premises in Kamwokya; lack of accountability and transparency in the management of Shs3b that the party annually receives from government and; failure to present purchase agreements for some of the party properties in Makerere Kavule.

The document alleged that some of the land titles of some of the party’s properties are in the names of Mr Kyagulanyi’s brother, Mr Fred Nyanzi, and not the party.

NUP pushes back
Mr David Lewis Rubongoya, NUP’s secretary general was quick to dismiss the document saying that it “contains material falsehoods”.

“Mrs Barbie Kyagulanyi is not and has never been a signatory to any NUP account. The signatories to the single party account we have are the president, secretary general and the national treasurer as is standard practice, and in accordance with the NEC resolution,” he wrote.

He also said that Mr Kyagulanyi and Mr Nyanzi do not earn salaries from the party, but are facilitated to carry out mobilization work in line with their mandate.

He also pointed out that NUP has been housed in Kyagulanyi’s premises rent-free since 2018.

“NUP regularly files its accountability reports in accordance with the law. In addition, we have constantly accounted to party members and the public by detailing the items we spend on, but most importantly through our activities and acquisitions as a party,” Mr Rubongoya wrote.

The party he added, has bought six pieces of land in Kavule, five of which are in the names of NUP. None of the titles is in the names of Mr Nyanzi, he stated.

The back and forth between Mr Mpuuga’s allies and those of Mr Kyagulanyi has set the stage for what is certain to be a drawn out fight. The question is, “who will blink first?”

Illegality?
Issues around how NUP is managed have however been a side show. It seemed intended to divert attention from the real issue here - whether it was morally wrong or even illegal for Mr Mpuuga to have accepted and taken the “service award”.

Many think that it was illegal. The President of the Uganda Law Society (ULS), Mr Bernard Oundo, is among those who think that it was illegal.

“To the extent that there was no bill or motion presented on behalf of the Executive in relation to the impugned award emoluments, they constitute an illegal charge on the Consolidated Fund of Uganda,” Mr Oundo wrote.

He called for an investigation and urged Parliament and the Parliamentary Commission to publicly address the award and demonstrate their commitment to the laws governing remuneration of legislators and commissioners.

However, Mr Dan Wandera Ogalo, the Constitutional Lawyer who during the life of the 6th Parliament presented the private members Bill that culminated into the creation of the Parliamentary commission said the award can only be deemed illegal if it was not provided for in the budget of the Parliament and the commission.

“The law that I introduced in Parliament provides that every expenditure of the commission must be in the budget. It therefore means that if you go to the budget you should be able to find a vote and those items there. As far as the law is concerned I expect that the law followed that. Now if they did not follow it, then that is a very different story,” Mr Ogalo said.

If the differences of opinion are anything to go by, the legal ping pong around the “service award” will be raging on for quite a while.

Different value systems
It should however be noted that the manner in which discussions round the “service awards” have been conducted reveal deep divides that mirror the different criteria and values systems that the citizenry has with time come to judge different political parties and actors.

That was perhaps best manifested on the night of March 7 this year during the NTV television political talk show, “On the Spot” hosted by Mr Patrick Kamara.

“The issue of the service award for Hon Mathias Mpuuga of Shs500 million. Did Parliament give Hon Mathias Mpuuga Shs500 million as a service award?” asked Mr Kamara.

Mr Chris Obore, parliament’s Director for Communications and Public Affairs had to remind Mr Kamara and the audience that NRM backbencher commissioners, Mr Solomon Silwanyi, Ms Esther Afoyochan and Ms Prossy Mbabazi Akampurira were also beneficiaries, walking away with Shs400 million a piece, thanks to the decisions arrived at during the Commission’s meeting of May 6, 2022.

The revelation has however not spurred the leadership of the NRM to publicly condemn its commissioners in the same way that NUP has done, a stance that Mr Emmanuel Dombo, the party’s director for communications, defended saying the party cannot be jerked into action because of revelations made on social media.

“It is not in our modus operandi to pick information on social media and act on it as if it is factual. We can use it to establish the facts then the appropriate levels of administration are petitioned depending on the seniority of the persons involved,” Mr Dombo argued.

The problem though is that the public too does not seem to be bothered that the NRM backbencher commissioners were party of the self-awarding crew. Little condemnation or no condemnation has gone the way of the Bukooli Central, Zombo and Rubanda district legislators.

Prof Sabiti Makara, who teaches Political Science at Kabale University, said this comes down to the fact that pilferage and waste of public resources have been carried out with so much abandon over the last 38 years of NRM rule that the public is no longer surprised when an NRM cadre is caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

“The ordinary people are saying that for the NRM people to take their money from Parliament, call it stealing, is normal,” Prof Makara argued.

Ugandans have indeed been witnesses to some grand cases of corruption over the last three decades. There was the purchase of undersized uniforms, corruption the purchase of Santana vehicles for the army; purchase of expired food rations; the junk helicopters, theft of money meant for valley dams, theft of money meant for the purchase of drugs for the treatment of HIV/Aids patients; theft of pensions funds; theft of money meant for the treatment of for Covid-19 patients and most recently theft of funds meant for compensation of cooperatives that lost assets during the civil wars.

The public could in light of all those cases, some of them mega, be forgiven for having developed the perception that corruption and abuse of public funds are within the NRM’s DNA. Mr Dombo thinks that the perception could have been fuelled by Opposition propaganda.

“Public perception is guided by a number of factors. It may be shaped because of historical occurrences where government did not act as promptly as it should have, but public opinion can also be influenced by the trend in the media. If there is a repeated telling of a lie, people may over time think that it is the truth. It becomes worse if people want to use those facts in order to propel a political objective,” Mr Dombo argued.

Public heat
Whereas the NRM backbenchers are enjoying their “service award”, the Nyendo-Mukungwe legislator has been coming under immense pressure from the public, which Prof Makara said should not be incomprehensible.

“The public thinks that Mpuuga did wrong because their (NUP) own stated principle is that they are not going to get involved in corruption,” he said.

Indeed on March 2 while appearing on the political talk show, “Parliament Yaffe” (our Parliament) on CBS hosted by Mr Meddie Nsereko Ssebuliba, Mr Mpuuga explained some of the reasons that led him and other likeminded people to join hands and form NUP.

“We all had one common goal to play politics differently. Each one of us had partaken of dictatorship, intolerance, bad leadership and intrigue all these years so we wanted to change this narrative and give the country hope that there is a generation of Ugandans who would want to play politics differently,” Mpuuga said.

If the conclusions of Prof Makara are anything to go by, those who set out to play politics differently had not expected to be found dipping their fingers in the cookie jar or partaking of a share of any loot of sorts.

Those who read Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, just might remember that part where the main character NS Rubashov, meets Richard, the leader of one of the communist cells, in a picture gallery in a town in southern Germany to deliver the message that he had been expelled from the party for spreading defeatist propaganda.

“The party’s course is sharply defined, like a narrow path in the mountains. The slightest false step, right or left, takes one down the precipice. The air is thin; he who becomes dizzy is lost,” Rubashov told Richard.

Could Mpuuga have become dizzy at that critical time of the climb up that narrow mountain path?