By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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The wise saying “united we stand divided we fall” must have an equivalent in all the world’s reported 7,151 languages. But some countries seem to believe that “divided we stand united we fall” and so reject handling important tasks together as when they put more people on a task, they mess it up.

In Uganda, a group of activists calling themselves Harambe Initiative Uganda –HIU, swear that the more representatives we have in the national legislature the worse we are off as a country.

They have launched a campaign to collect 1.8 million signatures in the coming two months to force referendum to shrink Parliament from 529 elected MPs plus another 30 or so ex-officio members. They aver that the fewer we have involved the better the quality of legislation.

HIU cites smaller representative bodies doing a better job than those that unite more people from smaller units of units of representation.

They are unhappy with each of the country’s 146 districts sending a woman representative to Parliament, and propose only 15 women, coming from each of the original fifteen natural regions that made up Uganda. They also want the non-geographical representations called interest groups like youth, army, disabled, workers, scrapped, saying they are represented by the ministries they are aligned to.

Read: BUWEMBO: Power might belong to the Ugandan people, after all

The HIU however are not pioneers of wanting to put less persons to a task. In fact, as they were launching their campaign, the state was arraigning several prominent persons from public service, private sector and Parliament for apparently conspiring to kill the cooperative spirit in Uganda. They are accused of having taken away billions appropriated and disbursed to cooperative societies.

Although cooperatives launched the first recorded organised activities for the emancipation of Africans after the establishment of colonial domination in Uganda over a century ago, the spirit of uniting to better the economic situation of citizens started being assaulted after independence.

While cooperative unions were growing strong in the first two decades of independence, they started crumbling with the introduction of the foreign-inspired but government-enforced Structural Adjustment Programmes in the early 1980s. The Cooperative Bank was killed off in the 1990s and hardly any strong regional unions are still standing.

At village level, the cultural communal work that used to see everyone coming out to maintain roads and ensure sanitation is completely dead, with everyone left to their devices. Rather than working together to clean up, communities seem to prefer living in filth and exposure to disease.

There are other telling symptoms of rejecting unity and preferring individualism. Ironically though, there is an exception to the rule, with going solo is achieving better results than teamwork.

At this time as attention is turning to the Olympics due in Paris, Uganda has gotten used to expecting and winning gold by individuals at international level, yet top performance still eludes the country where team games are involved. In the world’s most popular sport of football, Uganda has never beaten any group larger than the small East African Community of few nations.

The HIU are ironically counting on our apparent dislike for numbers to garner numbers – the 1.8 million they are confident of garnering fast to fight numbers in parliament. They have no shortage of examples to prove that the fewer the better.

The US for example with a population of 332 million has seven times more people than Uganda, but its two houses combined have about the same number of legislators, 535, than as the smaller country and last year handled a budget of about $7 trillion, while their Ugandan counterparts handled just over $13 billion, some 535 times smaller.

The near pun in the digits is purely coincidental, as it is also in comparing with the state of California that has 120 legislators in its two houses, who are less than 25 percent of Uganda’s but ran a budget 25 times bigger than Uganda’s at $330 billion. The Californian legislators’ month remuneration of $7,000 is about half of their Ugandan counterparts.

As the India subcontinent which at 3,287,590 square kilometres is 14 times bigger than Uganda and has a population of 1.4 billion, it has about the same number of MPs as the smaller country.

So, will a referendum to have fewer than more people in legislation materialise? We shall know by the time of celebrating independence early October.