It is probably true that for over a decade the role and stature of parliament as an institution has been diminished especially with low quality membership, leadership, style of debate, output and conduct of some its members which needs rehabilitation and a reset. And it may also be true that the NRM in its current form in parliament does not appear to have new invigorating ideas on how to make parliament better except probably as voting and money machine.

But opposition MPs need to re-examine their shallow theatrics of regular, ineffective, and short-stint boycotts of parliament sittings. For two decades, starting with the now lame-duck and vanquished Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) under Prof. Morris Ogenga Latigo as Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LoP), egged on by his party president Warren Smith Kizza Besigye, the boycotts haven’t yielded ant tangible, let alone useful outcomes. The boycotts especially of the State of Nation Addresses, and Budget presentations usually attended by President Yoweri Museveni which they considered snubs to the president, have not stopped or derailed government programs both inside and outside parliament. 

The boycotts of these events became FDC and joint opposition standard practice through the leaderships of Nandala Mafabi, Wafula Oguttu, Winnie Kiiza, and Betty Aol Ochan, the last LoP of FDC that got vanquished in 2021, is now a faint pale of its former self, thoroughly discredited, divided and on the verge of total collapse and ruin. For considering Museveni as bad company, none of the LOPs so far has gained any political milage, and the case of Latigo and Wafula Oguttu, the voters, instead, booted them out. And yes, in a sense of poetic justice, Latigo, Kiiza, Mugisha Muntu, Alice Alaso, Kasiano Wadri, and now Patrick Oboi Amuriat and Nandala all got hounded out of FDC.

When NUP upstaged FDC as the lead opposition in parliament, the now discredited Mathias Nsamba Mpuuga as LoP, picked the filibuster style with political gusto and flair that pundits hope is living in solitary regrets as to why he often picked unwarranted, unproductive and unwinnable confrontations with NRM on the parliament floor. 

The recent shallow theatrics of NUP’s Joel Bisekezi Ssenyonyi to boycott the Gulu regional sitting ostensibly in protest to parliament’s extravagance, wastefulness and lack of feelings for the public purse, was, to say the least, a political charlatan’s crescendo in a fool’s paradise.

The Gulu regional sittings, the first in the planned series for Northern, Masaka city for Buganda region, Mbarara city for Western region, and Mbale city for the Eastern region split the opposition as many of them participated.

Ostensibly, NUP and its surrogates were protesting or sought to protect alleged misuse of public funds on parliament regional sittings yet usually eager to grab foreign trips that are more expensive and wasteful on the so-called bench-marking trips which mostly turn out to be ego-tourism.   

It exposed Ssenyonyi as a runaway unserious, unfocused and not strategic politician who should have taken advantage of the Gulu sittings on parliament’s funding to fan NUP politics and possibly spread its wings with vigorous engagements on the sidelines of the plenary even when they were not in-person attendance. 

Whatever the critics of parliament’s regional sittings may say, those sessions are good if not for anything else, at very least, spread trickledown economics because they take close to 1500 people, MPs, their staff and security detail with cash to spend in those cities. Obviously, anyone would have been too foolish to expect that only three sittings could solve all or any of the salient issues there, but focused media attention gives those cities and regions good publicity, and in Gulu and northern region case, the sense of peace, security and stability profile for tourism and investment destination they much need after a long war and ravage.