By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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From the day I maliciously bit mum’s breast with my emerging milk teeth at six months of age and grinned happily as she winced in pain, as so I was told, I must have committed a million other sins over the subsequent six decades.

But I refuse to descend to a moral low of debating whether illegitimate use of public funds for individual comforts is good.

Such a debate has been raging in my country for a few weeks, but many engaged in it don’t seem to realise they are engaging in an act of perversion, which I will not join, however itchy the temptation.

If some well-paid (some say overpaid) members of parliament, in a bid to increase their comforts, create excuses to deplete the already strained treasury of a nation whose debt service burden is on a trajectory to equal total revenue collections so that the government must borrow to keep paying debt, should we debate whether that is right? Then what happens if those who say it is right carry the day?

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For it already happened a few years back during the Covid-19 crisis, when the government was allocating emergency funds to the neediest.

MPs also decided to award themselves some $6,000 each, arguing that they needed it to help their constituents.

President Museveni was alarmed and objected. They insisted and went ahead to take the money. Shocked and dismayed, he directed that they hand the money to the accounting officers on the ground, in this case district chief administrative officers, who are authorised to manage public funds. The MPs refused.

The President said their stance was “morally reprehensible”. They reacted by condemning him with passing a motion of displeasure against him. They won, regardless of what the law says about handling public funds.

It seems we are back at it.

Recently, an online “exhibition” of Parliament was launched by activists and stuff came out. Some of it, leaked from investigative agencies, read like a grotesque piece of fiction. I resist the temptation to repeat them on these pages. The question the public would be asking is when the Directorates of Criminal Investigation and of Public Prosecutions will act. Instead, what has mostly been seen are debates condemning or supporting the acts.

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But, well, even in the Christian West, some people defended their “right” to own other human beings as beasts of burden called slaves. They were ready to go to war to defend their stand.

Are some Ugandans ready to go to war over their personal “right” to access public funds? Should the existence of such “rights” be debated, even as it explicitly violates existing laws governing the management of public funds?

And however loudly you debate it, will anything be done about it when the very body — Parliament — that is accused is the one that makes and amends laws? Any chance of it reaching the floor of Parliament for consideration?

With utmost due respect, can fellow Ugandans find something else, like British football leagues, to argue about and save themselves anger and stress!

Let the exhibition continue for as long as the organisers want, though personally I even see an unintended consequence of the debate amplifying the rot in the Legislature, thus making political leadership appear so nauseating that its pursuit may only appeal to criminally inclined young people as those inclined to honesty shun it.

In any case, what is the point of debating whether wrong, however well dressed in legalese, is good? What happens if the next online exhibition is about defilement of minors? Will people start debating whether it is good? To my one million sins, I will not add another of debating whether wrong is right.