Political decisions undermining service delivery

By Professor Venansius Baryamureeba

In the 2015/16 National Budget of sh23,972 trillion, sh2,894 trillion (12%) is budgeted for the Government Wage Bill.  Thus from domestic revenue of sh11,333 trillion, wages will account for 26%.

Despite this figure, which President Yoweri Museveni decried to be high in his budget speech of June 11, 2015, we still have several public servants such as teachers, nurses, doctors and police officers earning peanuts.

To improve service delivery to Ugandans we need to urgently recruit more teachers, nurses, doctors etc. For instance, the average class size in a Universal Primary Education (UPE) School is still very high and with little or no teaching materials and aids.

So there is definitely something wrong with the way we spend the funds from the consolidated fund on government wage bill.  The secret is that we have an unnecessarily huge parliament and a bloated public service sector which takes a lot of effort away from motivating key public servants like teachers, nurses and doctors who are even in short supply.

On July 15, 2015, to the astonishment of the general public, the Local Government minister, Adolf Mwesige, tabled a motion for a resolution of Parliament to create 39 new constituencies/ counties and once created the 10th Parliament will have 425 Members of Parliament (MPs) up from 386 in the 9th Parliament. With Uganda’s population estimated to be 36 million do we need all these MPs? The answer is a straight no.

So what is pertaining elsewhere on the continent in regard to the size of parliament compared to the total population?

The United Republic of Tanzania with a population of 49.25 million has a Parliament of 356 members. Kenya witha population of 46.445 million has 349 members in the National Assembly and 67 members in the Senate. Ghana with a population of 26.8 million has 275 Members of Parliament.

The Republic of South Africa with a population of 53 million has a National Assembly of 400 members and National Council of Provinces of 90 members. The Federal Republic of Nigeria with a population of174 million has 360 members in the House of Representatives and 109 members in the Senate. 

This quick sample from across the continent clearly demonstrates that there should be a reasonable ratio of parliamentary representatives to the people. This shows that Uganda’s Parliament is over subscribed and should be reduced to less than 200 MPs. It is ironical to have the population over represented in Parliament yet the trend in Uganda has been that the bigger the parliament the less effective it becomes.

No doubt, the 10th Parliament might go down in history as the worst performing parliament by 2021 and it might be the parliament that might remove the presidential age limit from the national constitution or even change the political system from the Presidential system to a Parliamentary one.

In this article, I am concerned with the cost of the additional 39 MPS who will be earning at least sh25m monthly per person making a total of sh975m per month. Just imagine what this money would have done to the primary schools or health centres of the districts where these constituencies/ counties are going to be created in the name of bringing services closer to the people?

This calls for a balance of power between the central government and regional governments. We need to have functional regional governments to check the excesses of the central government. This would ensure that the upper house, the Senate’s representation is based on the number of regional governments and the lower house, the House of Representatives’ membership is based on population size just like it is in USA and Nigeria.

In 2016 it is possible for Uganda to have a Senate of 20 members and a House of Representative of 200 members for a population of 36 million people.

Article 1(1) of our national constitution provides that ‘’all power belongs to the people who shall exercise their sovereignty in accordance with this Constitution’’. The question we need to ask our politicians is whether these Ugandans are being enlightened to exercise their powers?

I bet if Ugandans were enlightened about the cost of increasing the size of Parliament against provision of other critical services like health and education to the same area they would have said no as long as the money for the additional MPs would come to their districts.

As a country, it is ironical to tell teachers, nurses and other low paid public servants that we don’t have funds to increase their salaries yet we are increasing on the size of parliament, creating more authorities, commissions and boards where lots of resources are spent on a few people!

It is now fashionable in parliament that whenever they think of implementing a law, the first thing they think about is to create an authority or authorities or commissions or boards. 

The average salary of the CEO of such a body today is sh28m. So when President Museveni talks of high government wage, more than 50% of the government wage goes to the ministers, MPs, employees of authorities, commissions and boards. Another big proportional goes to the administrative costs of the 112 districts with staff like district engineers, district planners etc who spend a big portion of the year without any work.

We need to move towards having five functional regional governments as provided for in our Constitution. Then these would catalsye reforms at national and regional government levels and check priorities of the central government with those of the regional governments.

The author is a Presidential Aspirant in the 2016 Presidential Election of Uganda