By Our Reporter
NATIONAL
Opposition Members of Parliament who are boycotting Plenary Sittings have responded to what they call the Speaker’s threats.
Addressing the Media today, 23rd November, 2023, the Leader of Opposition, Hon. Mathias Mpuuga said that they will not return to the House until their demands are met.
The Opposition MPs want the Executive to respond to their queries about the missing 18 NUP supporters.
During the Plenary yesterday, 22nd November, the Speaker of Parliament warned that she will invoke Parliamentary rules that dictate that any member who misses 15 consecutive sittings of the Plenary is expelled from the August House.
She also directed the Clerk to Parliament to stop the rebelling MPs from travelling abroad including the forthcoming East African Inter-Parliamentary Games scheduled to take place in Kigali-Rwanda between 7th and 18th December 2023.
The Speaker also directed that the rebel MPs should not attend Committee meetings as well.
However, in response, Mpuuga says, their absence from the House is official because they officially communicated adding that it’s the duty of Parliament’s presiding officers to consider how to treat official communication.
Mpuuga says, Anita Among’s orders are only diversionary and meant to derail them from asking the government to account for the missing persons, warning that they may go further and demand to see the graves where the 18 persons were buried.
“Our demand of the Speaker is to follow up on Parliament’s instructions to the Executive. We expect her to be neutral; an arbiter or referee whose duty is to demand that the Executive comes and answer. Other matters short of an answer are peripheral and we are not willing to be diverted into that,” Mpuuga says.
He revealed that the grace period given to the executive to respond expired on 19th November, 2023.
“I earlier communicated of a meeting we had in the Speaker’s chambers during which the regime’s Ministers of Defence, Security and Inter Affairs undertook to make a comprehensive response to each of the issues we raised. They had a time frame of 30 days which elapsed last Sunday on 19th November 2023,” Mpuuga says.
Meanwhile, the Speaker has responded in the afternoon plenary that government will respond when the Opposition MPs return to the House.
“The government has not failed to respond but the government cannot respond to people who are not there. The ones who asked for the report, are not in the House. Let them come back to the House and the government provides the report, Anita Among says.
