Parliament is the bribe

The price of “peace” and “stability” in Uganda may now be calculated at Shs2.6 billion per day.

I think this is how we may begin to make measurements based on the information currently roiling social media and public discourse since the dogged researcher-campaigners at the civic information project AGORA, began releasing details of how budgets under the ultimate authority the Office of Speaker of Uganda Parliament are managed.

The public have become at once mesmerised and outraged by reports of the amounts of cash that have been changing hands, and in the manner in which this is being justified.

What has become clear is that our Parliament is a place awash with cash which anyone connected to the place has a chance of receiving, depending on their principles. Daily Monitor then followed up with the figure of Shs2.6b as being the amount the institution consumes daily.

The river of cash can be divided into two parts: there are the officially designated payments and benefits like salaries, cars and even a clothing allowance, and then there are payments written down on paper so as to look official, bur have no basis the internal regulations. In both cases, the amounts involved stand much higher than any kind of money an ordinary Ugandan could expect to see in even a decade of hard work.

The initial idea of the online exhibition seemed to have been to expose the extravagance of the spending taking place at Parliament. However, the otherwise respected and until very recently, Leader of Opposition in Parliament Mathias Mpuuga has caught some serious strays as a beneficiary of that largesse, reportedly even participating in the approval the half a billion shillings award to himself as a previously unheard-of kind of parliamentary gratuity.

Many of those rightly criticising this state of affairs present it as an anomaly which the relevant authorities should correct. This is a mistake.  This situation is not accidental. 

The very establishment of the Parliament of Uganda through the adoption of the 1995 Constitution that creates it in the form that it is, was an act of trickery. To talk about “bribery” in our Parliament is to miss the bigger reality that Parliament itself – as the primary channel through which the regime can widely, safely and continually interact with the political class as a whole – is the bribe.

Many theories have been advanced in reference to Mr Mpuuga’s predicament: leadership rivalry inside the National Unity Party (NUP); a collusion arrangement with the ruling NRM party; straightforward bribery; naivety; and even him being collateral damage in a wider donor-funded fight to bring down Speaker Anita Among due to her role last year in overseeing the passing of the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

On the one level, this is to be expected. Any middle-class Ugandan functions daily under a near-siege of social pressures, some of which are self-imposed (there is a reason why car dealers and moneylenders used to be found loitering in the restaurants and hotels near Parliament). Also, family clan expectations from those who may have once invested in the education that made one obtain the qualifications or social connections that enable one to find work in the House, can seriously expect a return on that long ago kindness. Businesses in Uganda hardly produce the kind of returns that is, if they last long at all, that can sustain family life. And as for straightforward farming, well, forget it.

As a result, work based on a budget from the public purse is the most “reliable” and, therefore, desirable form of so-called employment.

So, there will be a whole mixture of reasons why some parliamentarians (and others employed there) will find themselves accepting cash handouts from the parliamentary safe: building a war chest for the next election; extended family pressures; seeing the first and only chance to build a viable personal life; simple greed.

However, Mpuuga and others will continue to have to explain themselves because this is a moral question about how leaders of poor people understand the management of public accounts. And by this, I do not mean a question of moralism. In struggle politics, there is a difference. 

At all times, it is a question of whether ones actions take one’s struggle forward for all, or not. And Mr Mpuuga’s party says that it is in a struggle.

However, to focus on his role as potential approver-receiver of this large bundle of cash, allows us to see one thing at the expense of clearly seeing two other things which in turn would enable to see even this one thing – the bribe that is Parliament as whole – more clearly.

This is a situation of long-standing.

Uganda remains stuck in a governance crisis going back to 1979, and which qualitatively worsened in the 1990s, with the onset of the privatisation programme. Instead of reversing the setbacks of 1979, regimes that followed have become wedded to policies that make things worse.

Any political action or statement made my political leaders must be measured against whether it brings the country closer to solving this crisis, it takes us further away from that.

I remain steadfast in the view that at a bare minimum, the following policy measures need to be put in place so as to get us out of this crisis, or at least to prevent it from getting any worse:

l Renationalisation of all State enterprises that were sold during the 1990s privatisation.

lRe-imposition of controls on how much foreign currency can be taken out of the country by rich individuals and corporations. 

• Removal of foreigners dominant influence from Bank of Uganda.
• Handing back of indigenous land to all the clans of the indigenous nations in Uganda, no matter how long that land has been in the hands of others.
• Legal revival of the co-operative system, with restoration of property compensation and tax breaks.
• Repudiation of all the other international trade terms that began in the 1950s, and have been handed down in the form of various trade treaties up until the 2000 Cotonou Agreement that, despite a few extensions, expired last year.
• Evaluate all outstanding public debts, and cancel all unacceptable ones.
• Imposition of at least a decade-long suspension of land sales and land-related loans. 

Some parties offer the promise of hope to the ordinary person, but I remain convinced that this is not going to lead to any material progress for as long as the steps listed above to address our economic pain, remain unimplemented.

Now, let us be clear: absolutely none, among the currently active political parties in Uganda can implement any of this, let alone just say it. None, without exception.

Collectively, they know that to seriously implement any of these policies if in control of the Ugandan government, they would face immediate and severe punishments imposed by the global economic forces negatively affected by the measures. 

Our parties have neither the orientation, ideological training, willpower nor inclination, to understand and take on such risks. There may be individuals among them with some level of such insight and backbone, but as a class, our elites are paralysed. There are no Thomas Sankaras there.

Yet without these minimum basic measures, there is really no hope for relief or progress. Instead, we will continue conning, cheating and mistreating each other, destroying our environment, and exploiting our youth in many ways, on top of selling them to Arabs, as a means of survival.

So, what happens in the meantime?

One response is for clever individuals among our people to begin leveraging the population’s pain so as to be brought to the table where they can then solve their own material interests.

The other is the response by those in power to keep things as they are. It is an old game of inclusion and exclusion. There is a good backstory to this.

The original ‘People Power’ movement was the mass uprising that began in the 1930s and ballooned into wholesale revolt by the late 1940s. There was a real risk of anti-colonial armed rebellion, and the authorities responded with a clampdown.

Andrew Cohen was the new governor sent in 1951 to find a solution. His astute plan was to retain the clampdown on the mass movement, but then to also find leaders with who the colonial authorities could do business. 

Godwin Toko, one of the AGORA activists, echoed some of the research Prof Lwanga-Lunyiigo published in his book: Uganda: An Indian Colony, 1889-1972, about the Asian community in Uganda.

The Legislative Council (Legco) was the first Parliament of colonial Uganda, established in 1921 to represent the day-to-day regulatory needs of the colony. It had been made up of Europeans only, until representatives for Asians, who had become very vital to the operations of the colonial economy, raised complaints. 

This led to Asians being given one seat of the council, to which they rejected. Take note: their complaint was not that the Africans had not been offered any seats at all, but that one seat was not enough for them as Asians. They got offered two, and the Europeans then added more to themselves. The natives remained outside.

This is why Cohen’s measures were so clever and also welcomed by many. Not only did he expand this council to include many Africans, some Africans were also recruited to senior posts in government as district commissioners, junior ministers and top civil servants.

The accompanying measures, such as keeping some original leaders of the mass movement in detention, the banning of the movement itself, and the banning of anyone with a trade union or mass movement background from forming or leading a political party, were, therefore, less of an immediate concern for these Africans who were now “in things”. This was the birth-moment of the Ugandan political culture that persists to this day. 

After Independence, Milton Obote nationalised the co-operatives, and made them and the parastatals the purview of his party largesse. Many families joined the ranks of the State-created middle class through appointments to these bodies. The mounting repression and intimidation of Opposition party members (even inside Parliament) was less of a concern for them.

In 1981, Obote came back. If my memory serves, there had been brief talk of forming a government of national unity at around the time of the 1980 election, no matter who “won”. 

Instead of that, we got a formal parliamentary arrangement. Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere, who insisted that he and his party had been the real winners, nevertheless accepted the offer to represent his party as Leader of the Opposition in Parliament (LoP), with all the perks and benefits the law provided.

Meanwhile, as the armed rebellion against the election fraud mounted, many members of Ssemogerere’s party (including at least two of his fellow Members of Parliament) were being abducted, assassinated, driven into exile and detained illegally by the Obote regime. 

While raising regular complaints about this, pointing an accusing finger at the government, Ssemogerere nevertheless on the one hand distanced his party from the rebellion, and on the other, stayed glued to his LoP position right until the 1985 demise of the Obote regime. 

The only two exceptions that in fact prove this rule are ironically the (1971-1979) regime of Gen Idi Amin and by contrast, the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) that replaced it. 

It is clear now, that amid the general tribulations that came with the rule of Amin, many elites were opposed to him simply because his policies alienated them from spaces they had been eyeing, or which they had been comfortable in the time before he took power. 

When the UNLF government arrived, many of the same elite voices opposed the UNLF’s attempted positive inclusion of the population through trying to significantly expand representation in the new Parliament to bring in people from across the country, and the opening of UNLF branched in residential areas and workplaces. 

Some argued that only those who had “physically fought” Amin had the right to rule after him. Eventually, they overthrew the coalition government and resumed fighting among themselves.

If this picture is beginning to look familiar; it should. Today, in one party, some members are in illegal military detention, other have been disappeared and others confirmed killed, while others are accepting Shs200m to buy themselves SUVs, from the Parliament established by the same military government.

Feuding, quarrelling, bickering, scheming, plotting, backstabbing, double-talk, bearing grudges and deception are all essential currency of middle-class political practice, and middle-class culture in general. Parliament and local government provide the near-perfect environments for these skills to be put to profitable use, especially during electoral cycles.

The lesson here is that ruling National Resistance Movement regime learnt  from the instability of the Amin period, is that “stability” comes from the giving the elite a sense of inclusion, without any real power. 

Co-option works. And so: “legal” or “not legal” is the side issue: the MPs Shs200m each for SUVs are provided for by law, the Shs500m to Mr Mpuuga remains up for debate among the experts. Further reports continue to pop up from social media activists, indicating that parliamentarians have continued receiving generous and illegal pay-outs from the parliamentary purse.

The key point is that the material result is the same as it was during the time of both Governor Cohen and Milton Obote (twice): the Olivia Lutaayas of those times remained in detention; the disappeared remained unfound; the NRMs retained State House; the Oppositions sat in Parliament, but now, there is no entrenched rebellion, because this time round, all of this “inclusion” is going to cost us Shs2.6b a day, “zokka”.

We often forget that the process of making the 1995 Constitution – which was to be Uganda’s “great re-set” moment – was a two-step one. First there were the public consultations undertaken by a commission headed by Justice Odoki, and then there was an elected assembly.

Once the bulk of the Constituent Assembly took the direction to strike their own deal with the presidency, they delivered three things: ignoring what came out of the finding of the Odoki Commission and so blocking both federalism and multipartyism, and giving the presidency its own election separate from Parliament. 

After that, the only task left for them was to design a document to provide comfortable employment for themselves and their offspring. They were bribed with a whole Parliament to have as their own.

It was a trap for the Ugandan middle-class (real or aspirant) as a whole, built on the Cohen model of old.  This was a man who insisted even many years later, that African nationalism, unlike Asian nationalism, can always be done a deal with, and should never be mistaken as being driven by Communism, as happened in Asia.

In this way, the middle-class – historically the site of much of our political agitation and contestations – became domesticated, collectively lowering their ambitions from ever holding presidential power.

This is not to say that nothing can be with the Parliament, as it stands, but this would require a thorough process based first on understanding the Parliament structure for the trap it is designed to be. 

But it is said if you wish to dine with the devil, be sure to use a long spoon, or when a lions invite you for dinner, first check to make sure you are not on the menu.

Clearly any party in this situation needs to develop appropriate measures aimed at stealing the legislative initiative, and imposing a popular legislative agenda on the House, while also preventing members from giving into temptations on offer. 

The question is: what counter-measures did the Opposition parties put in place to ensure they would not end up in the temptation problem? 

This is not as daunting as it seems: but it requires the development of a whole party ideology, as opposed to slogans, and a mass movement to which the party in question as a whole would be answerable. 

In other words, a repudiation of Cohen’s manoeuvre still in force, and a return to the original demands for economic independence that drove the anti-colonial movement, in the first place.

In short, to restart the 1949 to 1979 national debate that was drowned out by the militarist-created excitement of the 1981-1985 anti-Obote war.

We had seen forerunners to this: older readers may remember the exchange of sharp words between then Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) leader Kizza Besigye and then FDC MP Beti Kamya (now the Inspector General of Government), when the good doctor tried to impose a ban on FDC MPs accepting then newly introduced provision of giving each parliamentarian a vehicle. 

One can go further, when former president Obote tried to inoculate his party from becoming entangled in what he clearly knew was a trap (since he had benefitted from the Cohen one himself) and tried, from the exile of Zambia, to ban UPC party members from participating in any kind of electoral process organised under the NRM regime. 

People Power’s transition to NUP turned it into another political organisation tied into the electoral cycle, and the machinations of corridor politics. Perhaps it needs to be revived, and give itself power to recall cadres from deployment, the way South Africa’s African National Congress party recalled Thabo Mbeki from the country’s presidency.

For individual parties today since the return of multipartyism, it is similar to the impact that the 1993/5 Oslo Peace Accords had on the then mighty Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), by giving it some level of authority over the Occupied Territories that was not enough to make fundamental changes, but too much petty power to refuse. 

The PLO, already a rich organisation, became even richer (as did many of its officials), but ineffective in the things that should matter. As a result, its Palestine Authority government degenerated into impotence and corruption, and was eventually electorally defeated by Hamas (who are not concerned at all with what is “legal” and what is not, under Occupation Law), in Gaza.

We can understand this mass bribe in two ways: either it’s the price of “peace”, as it replaced the previous raw contestations for full power by any section of the society that felt excluded, or it was it a ruse to entrench the presidency, and the empire behind it? Or both?

Uganda certainly needs a Parliament. In fact, in needs more than one. But the problem may not be that Parliament is simply “too big”, the problem may be more that it is badly designed to make good use of the size that it is. 

What we need is to have a Parliament assembled in a different way. There should be regional assemblies first, out of which members of a national House could then be elected. Regional assemblies create access through local language use, and allow individuals much more time to speak, so that Internal Affairs minister Kahinda Otafiire may stop complaining that there are “too many” MPs now and the three minutes allotted to each to speak are “not enough”. This, despite him having a whole new constituency created just to help him get back into the House.

Thanks to the other anti-federalist middle-class bribe known as (Prof Mahmoud Mamdani-designed) decentralisation; Parliament will always acquire three more members each time the presidency creates a new district for another clique of rural elites demanding one. So, it may still be growing.

In Buganda and the other formerly federal regions, there does exist some degree of regional assembly. Furthermore, under the reorganisation brought by Katikkiro (Buganda prime minister) Charles Peter Mayiga, every Lukiiko (parliament) member is required to also be a member of a Lukiiko committee. This guarantees that many more who wish to contribute to a topic can do so, without having to seek time on the floor of the main sitting. This provides for participation without competition.

The political class should beware: a day may well come when the presidency decides that it has milked all it can out of these arrangements it has made with them.

At that point, the political actors may discover the real implication of creating an electoral system where the President is elected separately from the party he leads, despite all voting taking place on the same day, and so giving the misleading appearance of being one election, as had historically been the case in the previous (and only) three elections Uganda had held before this current government came to power.

It means that a president can decide to get rid of Parliament, but still claim to be an elected leader himself. A president could even score populist points by citing the very bribery he has seduced them with, as a justification. 

And with now two generations of the political class having been made soft and comfortable with the trappings of “posts”, it would take them a long time, if at all, to become able to make a coherent response to this with the kind of focus previous generations of educated activists reacted towards a government doing them wrong. There are no Andrew Kayiiras among them.

On the other hand, the presidency may take the gamble and give them one last chance to avoid dissolution: make laws to have the next president elected by Parliament, and not the masses.

Kampala’s banks do not have enough physical space to hold all the cash that would change hands at that point. 

And Cohen’s historic calculation will be complete.