What kind of MPs do we need?

The country is in a political mood. About 1, 300 candidates were nominated to contest for roughly 446 constituency-based seats in the 10th Parliament up from 375 in the current assembly. The number of ex-officio members will depend on the President. The increased number of candidates vying for seats could signal increased interest in parliamentary work.

But two questions need to be answered: Firstly, what kind of Parliament do we need? Secondly, what quality of MPs do we need?

The first question was addressed by the mission and vision of Parliament which is to achieve improved accountability, rule of law and national development within a multi-party democracy system; and to be a vibrant, independent and people-centred Parliament.

The second question is what we need to address ourselves to now, not yesterday or tomorrow. As we make decisions on who to send to the 10th Parliament, it’s important to understand what job we are sending MPs to do and how they do it.

A proper job analysis for MPs will lead to clear job description; key performance indicators and results.
Traditionally, the role of the legislature is in three dimensions:

Legislation, representation and oversight. The legislative dimension appears to be clearly understood by many as per Article 79(1):

“Subject to the provisions of the Constitution, Parliament shall have power to make laws on any matter for the peace, order, development and good governance of Uganda.”

The controversy is on the two dimensions of representation and oversight. This is what I am drawing our attention to. What is representation? This can be viewed is various contexts. It’s about geography, ideas, groups, etc.

It means bringing views or having particular interests and groups in Parliament. It’s the reason we have youth, women, people with disabilities, UPDF and workers as interest groups. The logic here is that issues that affect a particular group like army, youth, women etc. are best understood by one of them because of the uniqueness of their issues.

But it does not imply, for Instance, that a district Woman MP cannot represent issues that affect youth and the elderly in a district. It simply means that when issues unique to women come up, they are best represented by a woman.

The other aspect of representation is the aggregated interests. This is best illustrated under party representation where interests of the party take priority. The assumption here is that a political party will have aggregated all interests which their members then represent.

The independent political actors are assumed to capture interests outside political parties.
We also have other forms of representation like geographical representation as in the case of youth MPs and ethnic representation.

We have unique aspects as a result of our different cultures which also affect our national identity. Nonetheless, these unique aspects must be represented.

So, in a democratic arrangement, we need to participate but we can’t all be in Parliament. We participate through voting; and that is why MPs are not appointed. The candidates who majority voters agree with, are the ones who get to Parliament, hence substantive representation.

This means that MPs job is to represent issues specific to the region or locality. Their work is to ensure that issues that matter at the local level get national attention and issues at the national level are reflected at the local level. It’s why they sit in district councils as ex-officio members.