The Bakiga say that instead of eating nothing, you rather eat a small bird!
The Parliament of Uganda has passed a supplementary budget for Covid 19 and MPs allocated themselves sh20m each to purportedly fight Covid 19. It is the not the first time they are doing this. It reminded me of 2010 when MPs allocated themselves sh20m each to monitor NAADS after passing sh600bn supplementary budget. The same happened in the 7th Parliament when MPs allocated themselves sh5m each to wet their beaks after removing Presidential term limits and most recently sh29 million to remove the age limit clause from the Constitution. It doesn’t matter whether their counterparts in Kenya, Rwanda and elsewhere are reducing their salaries. For our MPs, their narrow interests are catered for and Ugandans can go to hell!
As usual gullible Ugandans will pour their misplaced anger on MPs condemning them for this selfishness and greed. I am not part of the bandwagon condemning MPs. To condemn them is to ignore the cause of the problem and focusing on a mere symptom!
Having seen repeated patterns of behavior from the 7th to the current 10th Parliament should have shown us that the problem is bigger than the MPs. The fact that those people we elect becoming worse than their predecessors is an indication that the problem we are contending with is structural and systematic.
In Uganda, even the most stupid person knows that Ugandan Parliament is not only a rubber stamp of Gen Yoweri Museveni but also a toothless dog. Like any dog, Ugandan Parliament has been made to hurriedly eat it’s own vomits several times by overturning what they had passed without shame! Do you remember the famous oil resolutions? What about the recent resolutions on the curriculum? You wonder why Ugandans even have to carry such a baggage of over 450 “Honourables” who are simply voting machines.
The day they pretended to exercise some sort of independence, the President unleashed terror led by his special forces who had to beat them up like cows and threw them in jail. When the speaker attempted to to write some letter asking for clarification from the Sabalwanyi, her letter was dismissed with contempt and thrown in the dustbin!
Even on this Covid 19 crisis, Parliament tried to halt the distribution of food in Kampala and were simply ignored, not even did the Sabalwanyi waste his time responding to them. And he was right any way, why would he have responded to an institution whose credibility he bought long ago in exchange for a few pieces of silver? Can you eat your cake and have it?
So having known their level, the best the MPs can do is to humbly coil their tails, apologetically crawl under the dictators legs, accept their fate, pick a few crumbs and leftovers that have fallen off his table, sit on his feet and eat!
Like the saying goes that there is no stupid dog when a cow has been slaughtered at home, our beloved MPs can’t accept to lose everything including the leftovers, if the cow has been slaughtered, and the whole meat taken, they will atleast carry the cow dung and the hooves (murokonyi).
Forty years ago, the king of the jungle Sabalwanyi went to the bush, killed an animal called Uganda & started feasting on it together with the pride. A few royal hyenas were invited to have some feast, those that have known their level have since eaten and got satisfied, those that couldn’t know their level, made noise, were used and dumped.
Now what is remaining is for the scavengers also to feast and have their share too! If you can’t be the lion atleast be a hyena, if not a hyena, atleast be a vulture for as long as you can have a share of the carcass called Uganda.
If people are sharing billions for billboards and Social media, why couldn’t MPs also have their sh20 million too? Go on our MPs, Uganda is at your “self service”.
Muhimbise George is a political analyst. He can be reached on email: muhimbiseg@gmail.com, or telephone number 0787-836-515
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