UGANDA'S PARLIAMENTARY TYRANNY IN THE MAKING?

 

If recent reports are to be believed, Members of Parliament pushing for a recall of parliament from their current recess to discuss the issues surrounding the death of Buteleja MP Cerinah Nebanda have secured the required numbers and are seeking an audience with the speaker to effect the recall.

Nebanda died under mysterious circumstances and was allegedly abandoned by her “friends” at a local clinic apparently after they realized she was in bad shape.

A report released last week showed that the MP was getting medication for pre-existing conditions but may also have ingested illicit drugs.

Subsequently a government pathologist was arrested at the airport on his way to South Afica with samples from the deceased MP, that he was taking  for independent tests. The police say he had no authority to do that and are set to charge with abuse of office among other things.

The strange sequence of events have raised suspicion and understandably so.

The MPs claim to have raised 133 signatures, a figure more than the third of the 388 member house required by law to cause the house to reconvene.

The proposers of the recall want the house to discuss the recent arrest of MPs for utterances they made following the arrest of the Nebanda.

The MPs arrested were Chris Baryomunsi and Meddie Nsereko who were detained separately and released.

In addition some MPs seem intent on discussing the happenings around Nebanda’s death. MP Geoffrey Ekanya speaking on a local radio station said that they had lost faith in the government process following similar mysterious deaths in the past that he claims have gone unresolved.

The ruling NRM do not support the house’s recall from the festive recess.

That the MP’s death was unfortunate is an understatement.

These contestations and many others before and many more to come, are the teething pains of democracy.

The law may be well laid out as to separation of powers between the three arms of government but one can always expect there will be jostling for space for a longtime before each arm appreciates its boundaries.

It would seem unreasonable to try and inquire into the death of Nebanda by the house,  as it has become a criminal case.

The MPs made statements outside the house, which therefore makes the susceptible to prosecution, but more importantly being honourable men whatever they said, I would like to believe, was backed by fact and could be useful in investigations into their counterpart's death.

It would be strange if MPs in discussing the issue for example demand that charges be dropped against their counterparts, as that would be interfering with the work of the police.

In fact, why the police continue to be understaffed, undermanned, undercompensated and therefore always  several steps behind the criminal elements could be a question parliament may be well placed to answer.

"That there may be a loss in confidence in the police as MP Ekanya suggests, usurping their role would not be the best way to redress the issue, unless the MPs are trying to expand their powers to criminal investigations....

They say that, all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Some MPs knowingly or unknowingly are looking to perpetuate a tyranny of parliament over us. The oversight role of parliament is important, even critical in the smooth running of nations, but even its powers are not unlimited.

Some may argue that executive’s excesses are such that its only parliament that can check it, but two wrongs do not make a right.

MPs putting government on tenterhooks may make for very good drama. But when the drama becomes an end in itself, while ruing the fact that we get the leaders we deserve, we wonder whether we are getting value for money...

ANOTHER THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT?

In 1986 when president Yoweri Museveni came to power he lamented how backward the country was. One of his favourite illustrations of why we remain backward was that more than two decades after independence we did not even manufacture safety pins.

Well 26 years down the road and we still do not manufacture safety pins.

Last month the key note speaker at the 6^th Competitiveness Forum was economist Professor Ricardo Hausmann,

Hausmann’s work on relatedness of products traded in the global economy, the product space, and its predictive value in determining the economic growth prospects of countries is fast gaining traction.

One of the outcomes of this work is the creation of the Economic Complexity Index, which differentiates economies by the complexity of the products they make. The more complex the products and economy makes e.g. jet planes the more developed it is.

In explaining why the US for example, has experienced an explosion in wealth in the last two centuries, unparalled in economic history, Hausmann says that it is down to the country’s ability to produce more and more products.

So the trick seems to be, to produce more and more products and that are also increasing in sophistication. You expand your product range by producing related products and then increase the sophistication of the products and processes.

So for instance since we do fish not only can we go up the value chain in fish processing but we can also branch out into crocodile farming and its related industry maybe, with much greater success than we would if we attempted manufacturing speed boats?

The greater the sophistication of an economy or product the more knowledge is embedded in it – a calculator has much more knowledge embedded in it than a pencil and needs greater organizational sophistication to produce.

For purposes of illustration Hausmann uses the term personbyte to refer to the knowledge in one person.

“To create products with more than one personbyte, you need to aggregate personbytes. This is done by creating networks of people we call firms and networks of firms we call the value chain,” Hausmann said.

Government interventions have been many and registered varying success.

It seems though that the more sustainable interventions by governments would be to enable companies to go about the business of making these products.

Interventions such as charting credible national strategies, efficient provision of public goods – law & order, social services and infrastructure are more effective than government trying to startup companies and create products.

This is because the private sector driven by the profit motive is best suited to leverage the process of experimentation and inevitable failure that comes with identifying products and markets. Governments on the other hand are often driven by other motives than operational effectiveness and market efficiency.

Which brings us full circle to why Uganda is not yet manufacturing safety pins 26 years after Museveni identified this a singular failure of our economy.

One, Uganda probably does not need to produce safety pins – who uses them anyway? Two, there are no related industries from which we can launch our safety pin factory and therefore we are not the best suited to produce suited to produce safety pins – one can probably get them cheaper from China anyway.

But it was not our inability to manufacture safety pins that was at issue, but that the economy was not diversified enough.

And Hausmann’s work suggests start with where you are but warns against getting fixated with agriculture.

He says developing agriculture and its related industries is not sufficient to ensure sustained development but that in addition we need to be making other things as well. Agriculture can as well serve as a launch pad.

He gave the interesting example of the Finland whose major natural resource is its forests, so the Finns developed wood-related industries.  But they also developed industries that specialised in making the cutting tools for felling trees. But since cutting is cutting they extended this technology to cutting tools for anything else. And then they automated these tools. And they made them more precise using high technology. To cut—pun intended, a long story short the unintended consequence of the development of the lumbering industry was the creation of mobile telephone technology that led to  Nokia.