Ugandan Members of Parliament (MPs) will no longer receive allowances for plenary sittings and committee meetings they have missed, the head of the country’s legislative arm of government has announced.
The decision was taken after MPs persistently skipped plenary sittings and committee meetings, reneging on their cardinal roles of representing the views of their constituents, making relevant laws and providing oversight.
During a number of parliamentary sittings, there sometimes a small number of MPs in the House. In some cases, the number is so small that there is lack of requisite quorum for key votes on amendments and other pieces of legislation.
The number of MPs attending plenary is always significant, curiously so, when the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party and its national chairman President Gen Yoweri Kaguta Tibuhaburwa Museveni, is interested in a bill.
On other days, there will be a few MPs. The situation is not any different in committees which some of legislators skip to attend to their private businesses.
Now, Speaker Anita Among says she is concerned that MPs who skip plenary sittings and committee meetings continue to receive a lump sum amount for the work they have not done.
Among, who is also the Bukedea District Woman MP, says her administration will come up with ways of ensuring that tax payers money are not dished to MPs who have failed to do their work.
On July 12, Speaker Among told colleagues that Parliament would soon consider reestablishing the practice of deducting allowances of MPs who don’t attend plenary and committee meetings, so as to control the wastage of taxpayer’s money that goes towards payment of salaries of MPs, yet some of them abscond from their legislative duties.
“My Sergeant at Arms was telling me that what you were talking about last time of payment and deductions, stopped in the 7th Parliament, but we can still resume it. Let us not waste taxpayers’ money,” said Among.
“This is a people’s centered Parliament, we work for humanity and we should be able to do that.”
Recently, a number of MPs on the spot after they refused to pay their personal assistants. Two others have been thrown in prison over debts after they borrowed to finance their campaigns but have since failed to pay. (See Details Here and There).
You can see the list of Uganda’s most highly paid government employees as well as the fat cats in the Judiciary Here and There.
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