There was drama in parliament on Tuesday when the Deputy Speaker, Jacob Oulanyah, openly frustrated and blocked attempts by the opposition to cut budgets of various ministries and have the money re-channeled to enhance the salaries of teachers and other government workers.
Oulanyah used the majority numbers of NRM MPs in the house, which sat from 10am to almost midnight, to deny all proposals by the Shadow Minister of Finance, Geoffrey Ekanya, to cause the budget cuts from the ministries.
In his proposal, the leader of opposition, Nandala Mafabi, had identified 16 sectors from which he could make cuts of 8 percent across the votes, exclusive of wage bills. He said that he had raised up to 402 billion shillings from such cuts to increase the salary of teachers by 50 percent this financial year.
Nandala also proposed a 20 percent budget cut from the ministry of Defense and Public Administration to raise up to 120 billion shillings, which he said would go towards increasing salaries of the teachers, soldiers, health workers, prison warders and police officers. He said that this proposal, if passed, would leave government with only 50 percent to pay the teachers next financial year.
Nandala argued that the cut from the various budgets was from the realization that none of the sectors whose budgets were cut has ever used its entire budget of 100 percent in the last five years. He said majority of them were performing at 90 percent of their budgets.
Some of the sectors that had their budgets proposed for a cut include security, works and transport, agriculture, State House, President’s Office, Water and Environment, Justice Law and Order Sector, Defense, Parliamentary Commission, and Energy and Mineral development, among others.
From the ministry of defense, the opposition had proposed to cut the budget meant to wind up operations of Lightning Thunder in DR Congo. The opposition said this was not a priority but a suspicious conduit to waste public money.
But when the proposals were put to a vote, Deputy Speaker Oulanyah ruled that the opposition had lost it, even when the “Ayes” in the voice voting sounded more unanimous.
Oulanyah later ruled against Nandala saying that even if parliament had the right under the law to cause budget cuts from a sector, it did not have the powers to re-channel funds to other sectors.
There was, however, more embarrassment to government and parliament when in the course of the debate, it was discovered that there were more than two different documents, with varying figures, that had been distributed to the MPs. Debate was suspended for close to two hours at the request of Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi, to allow for a reconciliation of the documents.
The MPs are now working on the final consideration of the figures to get the budget estimates for the financial year 2011/2012 passed by end of Wednesday.
