By Mulengera Reporters
During the UBC’s Behind the Scenes program of this Wednesday, Dr. Patrick Wakida said the problem constraining legislators’ effectiveness has a lot to do with the fact that MPs don’t have a budget to deliver social services and do things for their voters.
This is something with which Dr. Sarah Birete, a member of the UBC panel, sharply disagreed with saying that is how it should be because MPs ought not to have a budget because the delivery of services is the work of the Executive and not theirs.
Wakida also sweated to explain which gains are there in his Kabweri County to be protected under the current theme of the NRM manifesto. He was given more than 10 minutes but he was unable to articulate any visible gains that his people have attained in the last 40 years of Gen YK Museveni that merit protecting.
Birete agreed with fellow panelists who had spoken earlier that indeed not much ought to be expected under the 12th Parliament because Anita Among, who predictably will be leading it as Speaker, has turned MPs into “legislative robots” who are here to do nothing but what she called “robot legislation.”
She castigated the Speaker of Parliament Anita Among, who she described as mere “flower girl of the regime” for always being in a hurry to pass many laws as opposed to allocating legislative processes adequate time so as to allow adequate time for consultations so that citizens can make their input into legislation.
She said she was disappointed to see the same Anita Among-led MPs, who had excelled and appeased citizens by taking a firm stand against the pro-Pinette proposals on coffee as had been put forward by the President, easily giving away everything and abdicating their responsibility by enacting another law that amended on what had been existing as the law governing the coffee business. This amendment, she asserted, ended up introducing more deprivation than had been intended under the Pinette proposal.
Birete claimed that the current Parliament, whose tenure ends May next year, will go down in the books of history as Uganda’s worst so far. She said the leadership and quality of membership at Parliament had declined to levels no one would ever imagine.
She asked fellow panelists (Patrick Wakida, Dr. Yusuf Sserunkuma & Benjamin Katana) to compare and contrast the current composition and leadership of the legislature with what prevailed during the days of CA in the early 1990s. She said what has been happening at Parliament in the last five years is nothing but deliberate distortion of governance, which she said causes Uganda to be laughed at globally.
Yusuf Sserunkuma also discomforted the already battered Wakida even more when he contemptuously referred to his decision to seek to join Parliament and become an MP as opposed to staying put at Uganda Investment Authoruity (UIA) as one of the directors, as proof that anything that can go wrong in a country has already happened to Uganda. “This man doesn’t seem to realize that remaining as a Director at UIA is a much more powerful position than sitting in Parliament. Maybe he is excited about the prospect of being able to set his own salary and getting a very big car for himself than doing the real work of transforming this country.”
Sserunkuma also sarcastically called upon Timothy Nyangweso, the moderator, never to burden himself asking such hard questions to Wakida because the poor man has just defected to NRM and doesn’t know that much about the so-called ‘protection of gains’ being the major theme and focus of the ruling party’s election Manifesto for 2026. He insisted that the only person who authoritatively can answer such questions is Gen YK Museveni who is the founder and owner of the Movement.
Sserunkuma also explained why it’s wrong for anyone to belittle the elite making it clear they are very much necessary to the extent that whoever comes after Gen Museveni will have to rely on them and tap into their expertise to rebuild the country and redirect it back to the right course. He said Semujju Nganda is 100% right in his argument that he elite out to be prioritized when voters choose who to send to Parliament. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
