MICHAEL ABONEKA: Rationalise central government and Parliament too

Uganda, 62 years after independence still faces the challenge of creating a more effective and responsive government that serves the needs of its people. The same government created various departments and agencies in a bid to foster service delivery. The government has today argued that it needs to take control of delivering services thus the need to rationalize various agencies such as UNRA, NFA with UCDA attracting heated and sharp differing opinions. Much as the government seems to be operating in good faith, by saving millions of money spent in the running of agencies, the question of efficient delivery of the same services has not been discussed. The Ministries have been limping before, with the return of the agencies to them, no one knows how exactly this is going to look like as we forgot to deal with the real patients, the Ministries.

Be that as it may, if the government is serious about cutting the public wage and focusing on service delivery, why aren’t we rationalizing cabinet and parliament too? There is no empirical evidence to show that the bigger the government the more services delivered. Uganda, with a GDP of 45.57 Billion Dollars has 82 Ministers, 529 Members of Parliament, over 40,000 civil servants and over 1.56 million elected paid politicians which number is projected to grow to 3.3 Million of which 1.4 Trillion shillings will be spent on the 2026 general elections.

According to the 2024/25 Budget Framework Paper, Ugandans will spend over 7.4 Trillion shillings on public administration alone. Turkey, with a GDP of 901.7 Billion Dollars has a cabinet of 18 while Kenya, with a GDP of 113.4 Billion Dollars has 22 cabinet secretaries (equivalent to ministers). Why should the office of the Vice President have a Minister-what exactly do they do? Why should Kampala have 2 ministers yet the Kampala City Council Authority is an extension of the executive and further, the Ministry of Local Government can cover it. Why do we have two Deputy Prime Ministers and 9 Ministers and many other envoys under the office of the Prime Minister? Their role can ably be performed under the departments. Can we merge the Ministry of Water and Environment with the Ministry for Energy or Lands? Defence with Internal Affairs? The Ministry of ICT and National Guidance can be a directorate under Internal Affairs and many more. If the government is honest about rationalising, we should also think of merging ministries too.

There is no doubt that our Parliament is bloated too. Uganda, with a population of about 49 Million people has a parliament equal to India which has the biggest population in the world of 1.43 Billion people which is incomprehensible. Our Parliament keeps growing every day- of course for patronage reasons and not really to serve the population. We must downsize Parliament and start evaluating whether we still need the Special interest group representation which in my opinion, we no longer need it as it has served its purpose and because some individuals benefit from having these seats in perpetuity, they will never open the debate up. Why do we have army MPS but not police or prisons? Why do we have MPs for the elderly? We should mainstream youth, elderly, women, and disability issues in policy-making and legislation-we don’t have to have them sit in the house. We need to cut the size of Parliament by more than half, and remove the City Woman MPs, who by the way, are unconstitutional seats, the municipality MPs too are not meant to be in Parliament too, it is a grave mistake which we should correct. Parliament as an institution needs a human resource audit to ensure that we are operating optimally with the necessary numbers. The rationalisation should not only stop with agencies and departments but extend to the central government and Parliament as well if we are to achieve the main objective.

It is expected that any change is always met with resistance especially one that has an effect on political power. As Charles De Gaulle said, ‘Politics is a matter too serious to be left to politicians alone,’ it is the right time for Ugandans to actively participate and demand these reforms too in order to have a functional government that responds to the needs of the People.