Why criticising MPs for demanding more benefits is
misguided and what can be done about it
Our MPs want Shs200 million each to buy cars. They want
their wages and allowances increased. They also want Shs68 million spent on
their funeral when they die. The public is angry. What more evidence does one
need to confirm that our MPs are indeed greedy?
Unfortunately, vilifying MPs over their unending financial
demands shows how disarticulated our pundits are from the reality in our
country. A better approach requires us to look into the structural incentives
that drive MPs into behaviours that our `intellectuals’ describe as selfish and
greedy. We need to look at the facts.
Fact One: The stories about MPs being paid too much money
are almost always shortly followed by another series of stories of MPs being
financially bankrupt or highly indebted. Some MPs have ended up in jail over
debts and it gets worse with every new batch of MPs. The last parliament had
nearly 50% of MPs not earning their salary because it was being deducted at
source to pay their debts.
So how come being so highly paid has not made our MPs rich.
It appears being a legislator in Uganda imposes onerous financial burdens on an
MP, and eventually has serious implications on the independence of parliament.
Financially distressed legislators cannot resist bribes from private and public
officials who want to game the system. They even fail to exercise oversight
over officials that misappropriate public funds.
Fact Two: Our nation is blessed (or cursed) by a very high
anti-incumbency bias. In every election, more than 60% of MPs are not returned.
In USA only 10% of legislators expect to lose their seats in an election. This
high anti-incumbency could be because many MPs seeking reelection are
financially distressed and cannot satisfy the high expectations from the
electorate who think they are rich. Because every five years we have a near-new
parliament, we cannot say we have an entrenched legislative group. Yet in spite
of this, the demands for increased allowances remain.
Therefore, it should be obvious that this `greedy’ behavior
of our MPs is not an individual’s choice, but rather a structure of incentives
imposed by the nature of the electoral process in a poor agrarian society. The
question for us should be: what happens when you have electoral competition in
an ethnically diverse society where 70% of the population is made up of poor
illiterate or semi-literate peasants?
Karl Marx argued that every society is built on an “economic
base” – the hard reality of human beings who must clothe, feed and house
themselves. How people organise to solve these basic existential problems will
differ from society to society and from epoch to epoch. For instance, a society
can be pastoral, built around hunting, or structured into an industrial whole.
Whatever form people use to solve their basic existential
problems, they will need a superstructure of non-economic activity and thought;
it would need to be bound together by customs or laws, supervised by the clan
or government and inspired by religion or philosophy. This super-structure,
Marx argued, cannot be selected randomly but must reflect the foundation on
which it is raised. Hence no hunting community could evolve (or use) the legal
framework of an industrial society; and no industrial society can use the
conception of law, order, and government of a primitive hunting village.
Yet this is exactly what the postcolonial state inAfrica is
doing i.e. superimposing institutional frameworks of an industrial society on
an agrarian one.
Uganda’s specific context makes it a predominantly peasant
society. Peasant agriculture is heavily reliant on nature, which is capricious.
The vagaries of weather have across time and space fostered specific social
adaptations. James Scott in `The Moral Economy of the Peasant’ calls this “the
subsistence ethic.” Patterns of reciprocity, patron-client ties, extended
family systems, etc. are social institutions developed to ensure the basic
needs of the community are met.
For instance, when someone in the village has a problem, he
goes to a better off neighbour, relative, in-law or friend for assistance. In
doing this, the help seeker is not acting blindly. His upbringing has given him
a fund of moral values and a pattern of expectations of how those from whom he
seeks assistance will respond to him.
This, itself is based on how others in his community pursued
similar goals before him. Equally the rich neighbour or family member has a
clear understanding of his moral obligation to such a request. Not to help a
relative in need attracts social sanctions in form of a bad reputation or
negative gossip.
This moral economy has powerful implications on leadership
in peasant societies. To win people’s trust and, therefore, be able to lead
them, the better off person must cultivate a reputation of being a kind and
generous person. Many rich people do this at private expense. Others with
positions of state use the public purse. This generosity is what legitimises
their wealth within the poor community. (In industrial societies it is social
responsibility by rich companies and charitable institutions like the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation).
The rich in poor agrarian societies who do not exhibit
generosity regardless of the source of the money (private or public) lose the
confidence of the community. Such people do not win elections.
In Uganda, therefore, peasants look at MPs as the source of
solutions to their existential problems. They expect their MP to help them when
they need medical care, to meet funeral expenses, to get them a job etc. This
places a heavy financial burden on those who seek public office through
elections – hence the financial insolvency of our MPs.
So why is such patronage resilient? It is because it is the
most cost-efficient, cost effective, and (most critically) the only affordable
currency of reproducing power. Our nations are too poor to afford a wide range
of public goods and services delivered through impersonal institutions.
Besides, within their peasant moral universe, our people do not see it as
corruption when a politician extends personal generosity using public funds.
This is because they don’t have a conception of the separation
of the private finances of the politician and the public finances of the state.
The solution is to create a distance between MPs and their
constituents. Let political parties, not individuals, contest for elections.
After elections parties can appoint MPs proportional to the votes they got.
This empowers the party bureaucracy (which selects the MPs)
because it can be bribed. But it has less corrupting influence on individual
MPs and parliament as an institution. Rwanda and South Africa have it. Let Uganda
try it too.
****
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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