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POLITICS-UGANDA: Sharing the National Cake

Evelyn Matsamura Kiapi

KAMPALA, Jan 22 2010 (IPS) - Their caricatures show great wealth and status, being driven in flashy four-wheel drives surrounded by bodyguards, and receiving benefits including mansions, cars, medical care and travel and sitting allowances. They are treated as Very Important Persons.

They are not powerful business man, celebrities or even heads of national corporations. They are cabinet ministers, elected to government to serve the people.

In Uganda the role of a cabinet minister is to determine, formulate and implement government policies and perform other state functions conferred by the legislature – but in this part of the world cabinet ministers are often associated more with large fortunes than policy.

Cabinet ministers are possibly playing their roles, but this is not much in evidence. In most instances they are described only as chief guests – at the inauguration of a village spring well, launching of a workshop, or officiating at the opening of a new school or health centre – creating the impression that their function is merely to give speeches and cut ribbons for new projects.

And at the end of the day they go home with a fat ministerial pay check of up to 20,000 dollars a month in salaries and allowances – a remarkable salary in a country where medical doctors earn only 200 dollars a month.

The Constitution stipulates that the total number of ministers and their deputies appointed shall not exceed 42 without the approval of parliament. But Uganda has 25 full ministers and 44 ministers of state (deputy ministers), including three deputy prime ministers, three deputy ministers each for education, health and tourism, and four deputies for gender, labour and social development.

All these have their own departmental structure, and there are concerns that ministers in the same ministry duplicate responsibilities and are even in conflict, while others are redundant. A few years back one minister made it public that he was actually redundant, creating debate on whether we needed such a huge cabinet after all.

In spite of the numbers, development indicators remain poor. For instance, 435 of every 100,000 women still die in childbirth each year, and 76 of every 1,000 children are malnourished.

The Office of the President has now proposed that two more cabinet posts be created, sparking public debate on whether 71 cabinet members can make a bigger difference than 69 in an economy where 31 percent live on less than one dollar a day.

“I don’t think we need more ministers. This country needs only 10 ministers and 10 assistant ministers. That is 20,” says Professor Aaron Mukwaya, of the School of Politics, Makerere University in Kampala.

“The smaller the cabinet the better, because it is all about debating and taking decisions on critical issues. Making such decisions requires a small number of people, so as to reduce leakages and increases compliance and general respectability,” Mukwaya said in an interview with IPS.

Mukwaya also questions the role of the cabinet, and whether it performs as stipulated by the Constitution, or simply to appease the appointing authority.

“The cabinet is not only large but virtually useless. The intention of the cabinet is to appease the head of state. It is based on the idea that when you have a huge cabinet, it is incapable of making serious decisions. Therefore the president remains the only person who can make decisions. The cabinet is no longer an issue for development,” he says.

Some citizens agree with Mukwaya. “We have an unnecessarily big cabinet. I do not see the relevance of some ministries. Taxation is already a strain on us. Efficiency does not depend on numbers. Look at the state of our roads,” says 33-year-old Hadijah Kalibala, a management consultant in Kampala.

Thirty-nine-year-old taxi driver Boniface Kateregga concurs. “I do not see why Uganda should have a larger cabinet than developed countries like Britain and the United States,” he says.

Yet permanent secretary to the presidency Opio Lukone defends the numbers, saying they are not in contravention of the provisions of the Constitution: “Every situation is specific to a country,” he tells IPS in an interview.

“One must not forget that we are a nation in the process of construction, and there are many forces (challenges) that we are facing. The public says this number is too large, and the basis for this revolves around affordability.

“But I think before we draw a conclusion, there are many factors that go into putting a cabinet together, including effectiveness and the cabinet as the primary institution responsible for determining government policy and providing strategic direction.”

But Gerald Werike Wanzala, a team leader with the African Leadership Institute (AFLI), a policy think-tank and non-governmental organisation in Kampala, thinks Uganda is just getting its priorities wrong.

“Already the cost of public administration is so high. Women are dying in childbirth while thousands of children are stunted. There are no teachers in schools. So why can’t we first close those gaps before we can think of having so many ministers?” Wanzala asks.

Mukwaya calls the situation patronage politics to satisfy citizens, and based on ethnicity, tribe and region, not national issues. He says huge cabinets are part of the corruption process, a way of rewarding loyal ethnic groups and soliciting votes as the 2011 presidential election draws near.

But Lukone describes it differently: “In our situation there are a number of considerations, including political ones and ethnic group expectations.”

He describes it as ‘sharing the national cake’ (national resources) among the more than 50 ethnic groupings, who may be disgruntled if not represented in policy-making at national level.

“These are some of the difficulties that the president has to juggle with. You want a small and affordable cabinet, but there are all these aspirations and expectations, as groups will feel left out.

“It is a very difficult political balancing act. You want to pay attention to affordability and effectiveness, but you are also working for the population and this is what they expect,” is Lukone’s key argument.