The very first significant business of Uganda’s current Parliament was, regrettably, to do something quite predictable if egregious – that is, approve increasing the size of Cabinet. This was a repeat of what the first Parliament under the 1995 Constitution (the Sixth Parliament) did by amending a newly-passed Constitution to allow the President to appoint more ministers than initially provided for. Since 1996, Uganda’s Cabinet expanded exponentially, from 41 to 62 in 2002, nearly 80 at the close of the 2000s and now stands 82 strong. But it is not just the size of Cabinet, it is the entire public sector that holds the hallmarks of a bloated system bereft of rationalisation and fiscal prudence.
In 1995, Uganda had only about a dozen presidential advisors. Today, there are more than a hundred or, to put it in more apt terms, the number is hard to pin down. There was a time when someone was appointed presidential advisor on poverty in Ruhweju District in exchange for withdrawing from a parliamentary race for that district. Similarly, we had a presidential advisor for Ruharo affairs, the base of the East Ankole Diocese.
We have presidential advisors for poverty in different regions and sub-regions, a presidential advisor for this and that, from security and political mobilisation to cultural and community matters. The expansion of the Executive branch through ministerial appointments is squarely matched by the staggering growth in the size of the other political branch of government, the Legislature, such that today Members of Parliament cannot find where to seat during plenary proceedings. The space on the floor was designed for a much smaller number than the total of MPs elected today.
Uganda’s Parliament was 279 members in 1989, today, it is 529 plus several ministers who are not elected MPs but are ex-officials, taking the number in the House to as many as 540. In absolute terms, even disregarding population and geographic size, Uganda has one of the largest Parliaments in the world! Compared to other countries that are geographically massive or have humongous populations or both, our Parliament is ridiculously huge.
Worse still, Uganda had 39 districts in 1991. Today, they are 146, a nearly four-fold expansion of chairpersons, RDCs and Chief Administrative Officers. Even if we took the stylised argument of population growth and the need for serviced delivery, at about 50 million Uganda’s population has expanded less than three times. The bloated public sector, starting with Cabinet, is officially justified on account of better delivery of services to the people. It is a hollow argument. Consider the docket of justice. In the past, the Minister of Justice was also the Attorney General. Today, the two are separate, each with a deputy. But access to justice has arguably worsened. A separate Attorney General’s office, a Justice ministry, a substantial expansion in judicial personnel, but also a corresponding expansion in corruption that undercuts justice.
We used to have just a prime minister, now that office has three deputies. When Dr Specioza Kazibwe was Vice President, she was also Minister of Agriculture; now the latter has its own four ministers! Perhaps the most absurd is the Ministry for Gender, Labour, and Social Development. It has a total of six ministers: the ‘full minister’ and five State/deputy ministers in charge of culture, youth, elderly, disability and labour!
In Parliament, we have MPs representing the army and other special interest groups: workers, youth and elderly. Other than serving as avenues for elite access to the spoils of the system, these political positions do little, if anything, to serve the needs of the average Ugandan. Consider the case of Mr Ofwono Opondo P’Odel, a long-surviving regime propagandist. He may have realised he was out of favour in the evolving power realignment and succession dynamics, so he pivoted to a convenient opening, purporting to represent elderly people in eastern Uganda! Strictly speaking, Mr Opondo is neither an elderly person nor rooted among the elderly people in eastern Uganda as to represent them, yet he was declared unopposed for that seat!
Similarly, Ms Jacquline Mbabazi was once at the centre of a bitter fallout in the inner sanctum of the ruling NRM a decade ago when her husband, Amama Mbabazi, sought to wrestle power from Mr Museveni. In a dramatic comeback last year, she too was elected unopposed as MP representing the elderly in western Uganda. She is now a State minister for the elderly! The late Joseph Tamale Mirundi (I was never a fan of his raw rhetoric) captured these sorts of jobs and appointments as ‘welfare’.
But it is also how Mr Museveni has succeeded in ruling the country by distributing opportunities for personal aggrandisement and accommodating potential political troublemakers. A leading member of Museveni’s Cabinet was once sacked; he retorted that he was ‘capable of causing trouble’! Cabinet appointments and others are a way of mollifying would-be troublemakers but also to appease whole constituencies. This is flat-out political corruption, which otherwise is euphemistically called patronage!