Ms Persis Namuganza, the Minister of State for Housing, has asked Ugandans to vote out all MPs who refuse to append their signatures to the censure motion, seeking to remove the four Parliamentary Commissioners from office for sharing amongst themselves Shs1.7Bn in service award and paying themselves Shs23M on top of their salaries, without prior authorization from Parliament.
Speaking at Parliament on Tuesday after appending her signature to the Theodore Sekikubo-led censure motion that seeks to raise 177 signatures, Ms Namuganza said the House has lost credibility over corruption.
“The corruption in Parliament has become unbearable, for some of us who have seen some hidden documents, if you look at them, you wonder who is the clerk to Parliament who is giving out money in a wasteful manner with no details on what that money is going to do. I am asking all MPs who haven’t signed the censure motion to hurry up and if they don’t, I want to ask Ugandans to vote them out if they return asking for votes because they will be useless, and their actions would indicate that they support corruption,” said the minister.
“There are people who have been acting as saints like Mathias Mpuuga, I wasn’t accused of any corruption (during her censure) but he came out saying we want to sanitize Parliament and we want integrity, but I am not seeing his sainthood. We don’t want this process to be interfered with religious or traditional leaders, we can’t hold negotiations over corruption. Our party NRM is losing support due to corruption, so as me who is against corruption and wish to continue seeing my party in power, I have appended my signature to the censure motion,” added Namuganza.
She also asked both the religious and traditional leaders not to interfere with the ongoing exercise of censuring the Parliamentary Commissioners, saying corruption is such an immoral act for one to hold negotiations about.
She also claimed that some top leaders at Parliament are spreading fake news that President Museveni isn’t in support of the current censure motion, saying such talks make it seem like the President is condoning corruption, which isn’t the case.
The minister said the President always communicates through letters and NRM caucus and since no such avenue has been used, the MPs should go ahead and append their signatures to the censure motion.
Meanwhile, following complaints by Mr Ssekikubo (Lwemiyaga County) that Opposition MPs have shied away from signing the censure motion for Parliamentary Commissioners, the Leader of Opposition, Mr Joel Ssenyonyi on Tuesday led his team to sign the motion, where he described the exercise as vindication for National Unity Platform that was earlier accused of orchestrating their own, Mathias Mpuuga.
Ssenyonyi’s made the remarks while addressing journalists at Parliament, where he also rejected comparisons made between the Shs1.7Bn service award with the emoluments earned by leaders like Vice President and speaker, saying that whereas the emoluments were authorized by Parliament, this wasn’t the case with the service award.
“What happened is an irregularity, for colleague leaders to sit and award themselves money, they would have been vindicated if they had suggested it in a meeting, taken kit through the relevant Committee of Legal and Parliamentary Affairs to bring it on the floor of Parliament for discussion. Because what some of them are saying is the Speaker, Vice President all get benefits, those benefits were discussed on the floor of Parliament even when some of us disagree with the entirety of those benefits but at least they were passed on the floor of Parliament, this particular service award, where was it passed for people to sit and they did it in a very hasty manner,” he added.
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