Legal committee of Parliament will spend 715 million Shillings during the consideration of the now controversial Constitution (Amendment) (No.2) Bill, 2017.
Presented to parliament by Igara West MP Raphael Magyezi, the bill seeks to amend Article 102 (b) of the Constitution, which caps the presidential age at 75.
Chaired by West Budama South MP Jacob Oboth-Oboth the legal committee was on Wednesday September 27th tasked by the Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga to scrutinize the bill. The committee is supposed to present a report to the House on the amendment bill within 45 days according to the rules of procedure.
We have since learnt that the bill consideration process at the committee level is to cost the tax payer 715 million Shillings.
A copy of the draft proposed budget indicates that 227.2 million Shillings will be spent on the five planned committee regional consultations with each regional meeting costing over 45 million Shillings.
The committee plans to hold the consultation meetings in the Northern, Western, Eastern, Central and the West Nile regions. In each of the regions, the committee will be spending a maximum of 10 days with each of the 23 MPs sitting on the committee receiving 400,000 Shillings as per diem.
The other money is to be spent on per diem for parliament staff who will get 290,000 Shillings per field day each. Another 175,000 Shillings is for police officers on the consultation trip, 150,000 shillings for drivers, five million for fuel and another five million shillings as Contingency.
The draft budget further indicates that 88.3million Shillings is to be spent on a retreat to consider the draft committee report. The money will be spent on the venue, full board accommodation, transport refund and contingency.
For the benchmarking travels, the legal committee will need over 400 million Shillings to visit three countries which have not yet been identified.
The draft budget indicates that for each of the visits to a particular country, 36 million Shillings is to be spent on air tickets for five MPs, 11.2 million on air tickets for two staff, 64.8 million for MPs' per diem, 19.4 million for Staff per diem and 1.9 million Shillings for Visa fees.
This draft budget was discussed in today's committee internal meeting and sources reveal that some MPs sitting on the committee said that the budget seems minimal suggesting that the least estimate should be 1.5 billion Shillings.
