Museveni could well rule us without a cabinet

If you have been around long enough, and observed Museveni’s government over the last more than three decades, you know Uganda has travelled quite a distance, a tortured one at that.

Appointment to a ministerial position is supposed to be a high-stakes and critical matter. Ministers provide political leadership. They oversee the running of all government programmes relating to serving the needs and interests of the public.
Members of Cabinet along with the President and Vice President constitute the apex layer of the executive branch of government, the most important of the three branches, invested with executive authority to run a country.

Ministers supervise bureaucrats and technocrats. They formulate government policy and present draft legislations to Parliament. They issue directives to civil servants and provide overall oversight in the implementation of matters relating to public affairs.
So when the President names a Cabinet, it is supposed to be a truly high stakes business. It was the case in the past. Not any longer. For the ordinary Uganda, whether or not we have a Cabinet is neither here nor there. Not many Ugandans care anymore who is a minister in what ministry. This no longer makes news.

Today, Museveni can appoint any obscure fellow, even a patently incompetent and underqualified prime minister. Life will just go on. We do not have the tradition and the procedure available to the public to protest and stop a ministerial appointment.
Well, Members of Parliament through the Appointments Committee are supposed to play the oversight role. They are constitutionally mandated and are expected to perform the task of vetting, evaluating and questioning ministerial appointments.

As representatives of the public, MPs are supposed to raise questions and reject the appointment of a person, as prime minister for example, who is demonstrably underqualified for such a critical office of government. However, given the calibre of the current Parliament, and indeed several previous ones, to expect the Appointments Committee to do the actual job of vetting and questioning is of course to be naively optimistic.

We have reached a point in our politics where it is simply inevitable to be skeptical, in fact cynical, about anything to do with the rule of Mr Museveni and the government he presides over. A Cabinet of 80 odd men and women, many without any known public profile or a record of distinguished service, in itself is morally indefensible.
A poor country faced with enormous socioeconomic difficulties does not need such a bloated Cabinet that comes with a hefty public bill. But perhaps one would keep up with such a ludicrous state of things if the 80-person Cabinet actually made a qualitative difference and improved the quality of public goods and services.

Other than as a tool for granting elites positions of patronage and access to spoils of the State, a bloated Cabinet is of no value to Ugandans in the same way that a 530-member Parliament is nothing more than a huge financial drag, and a contribution to more confusion in an already messy and confused political environment. A bloated Cabinet adds avenues of grand corrupt practices and lining pockets of ministers and their acolytes.

There aren’t many particularly great things that Mr Museveni is doing for the country despite the messianic delusion and exaggerated sense of mission. But one gift he would grant the country is to actually rule without a Cabinet.
Given Mr Museveni’s unfailing faith in the military, over which he has a firm grip and entrusts it with programmes and activities in which he has serious interest, he can just pick a few military officers to help him run the government. This would of course formally make his a properly constituted military junta government, which at any rate it has been in practice.

Such a move would save the country the pretence of civilian democratic government but also the totally unnecessary bloated public sector of an 80-member Cabinet. The most important constant, and the real consequential matter, is for Mr Museveni to continue being life president. He can assure this and securely misrule the country without Cabinet.
After all he has complained, again and again, of nonperforming ministers and bureaucrats who fail him in his mission to transform Uganda.
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