Many have often responded to questions about Parliament’s allowances, per diems, honorariums, CSR etc by asking if it’s not legal. The suggestion is that, for as long as something is legal, it becomes acceptable. This argument is problematic in many ways. It would mean that for as long as one wants to avoid moral responsibility, all they need is to legalise their actions.
Ironically, you find the same people talking about ‘bad laws’, now or in the past. If legality cleanses everything, then there can’t be bad laws/policies. In fact, it becomes wrong to challenge any law.
We need to agree that things can be legal but unreasonable or wrong. There are many historical examples to this that don’t even require citing.
About Parliament’s payments (and beyond), we shouldn’t only ask if they are legal. We should also ask if it is fair in a country like Uganda with all its problems for our ‘representatives’ to primitively share our hard earned money like that. We are not asking for equality, that would be obviously utopian. But where teachers, police officers, soldiers, nurses etc earn feathers, is it fair for MPs, on top of their huge salaries, to take all those other monies totalling to billions – including for no work done for the benefit of the taxpayer on whose back they sit? Is that what it means to ‘represent’?
Parliament is not a private entity. It is facilitated by one of the poorest countries in the world – Uganda. It is not a British, American or Chinese Parliament. We can’t be a poor country with leaders competing in status and glamour with first world countries, at the expense of those at the bottom that they violently milk. With poor roads, poor healthcare, poor schools, should our MPs be swimming in affluence in the name of representing us?
We need to ask questions on fairness, not chorusing robotic inhumane responses that ‘it is legal’. If our representatives can not feel for us in the first place, is that representation? Rewarding themselves tax-free monies, as the wretched that they purport to represent are choking on taxes, and they expect us to call them Honorables! Representatives! We need to wake up against these structures of exploitation dressed in fancy bourgeois terms on high horses of legality.
#UgandaParliamentExhibition
