The first 100 days of Uganda’s 12th Parliament have passed. The speeches have been made, committees constituted, and the new leadership has laid out its ambitions. What remains is a more difficult question: what has this Parliament changed? In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the doomed revolutionary Rubashov confronts the consequences of a political system that placed too much faith in those exercising power and too little in the institutions that could restrain them. The comparison with Uganda should not be stretched too far; Kampala is plainly not Koestler’s Moscow. But the institutional question at the heart of the novel remains relevant: Can a political system remain strong while allowing its institutions to question, restrain and correct those who exercise power? The 12th Parliament opened in May after the 2026 general elections. Jacob Marksons Oboth-Oboth was elected Speaker on May 25, with Thomas Tayebwa elected Deputy Speaker. In his inaugural address, Oboth set out seven priorities, including zero tolerance for corruption, stronger accountability, evidence-based debate, results-based budgeting, an open Parliament and proactive oversight. The 12th Parliament began work in May and crossed its symbolic 100-day mark in early September. Parliament later went into a three-week recess before returning at the end of September. President Yoweri Museveni’s October 2 meeting with the NRM Parliamentary Caucus at Kololo Independence Grounds came after the first 100 days. At that meeting, the President urged NRM legislators to reconnect with citizens, monitor government programmes and become more involved in addressing problems affecting communities. The meeting highlighted a broader issue confronting the new Parliament: whether an overwhelmingly powerful governing party can simultaneously support the executive’s programme and subject that same government to rigorous scrutiny. That tension is not unique to Uganda. Parliamentary systems routinely require governing-party legislators to balance party loyalty against their constitutional responsibility to scrutinize public expenditure, legislation and executive performance. For Uganda’s 12th Parliament, the evidence of how that balance is working should increasingly be measurable. WHAT SHOULD 100 DAYS TELL UGANDANS? One starting point is parliamentary oversight. Parliament’s constitutional responsibilities include scrutinizing government administration and public expenditure. That makes some of the most important questions about its first months relatively straightforward. How many committee hearings were held? How many accounting officers were summoned, and how many appeared? Which major audit findings were followed up? How much public money was protected or recovered following parliamentary intervention? And what happened after officials appeared before committees? Committees including the Public Accounts Committee, the Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises, and the Committee on Subsidiary Legislation were constituted in July. Their existence, however, is only the beginning. Their effectiveness will ultimately depend on what their investigations, recommendations and hearings produce. The same test applies to legislation. Parliamentary productivity is often measured by the number of Bills processed or laws passed. But numbers alone reveal little about the quality of legislative scrutiny. A more revealing assessment would trace legislation through the entire process: Bills introduced, Bills referred to committees, recommendations made, amendments adopted and laws eventually passed. That would help answer a more important question: Did parliamentary scrutiny materially improve the legislation? The size of the NRM majority makes this particularly significant. A large government majority can accelerate legislation. Committee reports, amendments, and Hansard can show whether that speed is matched by rigorous scrutiny. The same evidence-based approach could be applied to government programmes, particularly the Parish Development Model. For every major programme, Parliament can pursue a basic chain of accountability: How much money was allocated? How much was released? How much was spent? What was delivered? And who benefited? At the October 2 caucus meeting, President Museveni urged NRM MPs to monitor government programmes and strengthen their engagement with communities. The practical test will be what information legislators bring back. For PDM, for instance, constituency-level reporting could show the number of intended beneficiaries compared with those who actually received money, complaints about illegal deductions and evidence of what happened to household incomes after beneficiaries received the revolving funds. Without such information, political calls to “return to the grassroots” remain difficult for citizens to evaluate. The same applies to barazas and constituency consultations. The important measure is not simply whether an MP held a meeting. It is what residents raised, which government agencies became responsible for resolving the problems, what deadlines were established and whether anything subsequently changed. Such records could transform constituency engagement from an essentially political activity into another layer of public accountability. Perhaps the more difficult question concerns the relationship between Parliament and the executive. Hansard can provide part of the answer: How frequently have NRM backbenchers challenged ministers on government performance? How often have government proposals been substantively amended? And how have recommendations from opposition MPs been treated? These questions matter because effective parliamentary oversight does not necessarily require hostility between the legislature and the executive. A governing-party MP can support the government’s overall programme while questioning whether a ministry has spent money properly or whether a programme is delivering what taxpayers were promised. That distinction becomes particularly important in a Parliament dominated by one political party. The strength of the majority, therefore, can be examined not only through its ability to pass government business, but through its willingness to interrogate that business before approving it. ELECTION PETITIONS EXPOSE ANOTHER TENSION The October 2 NRM caucus meeting also revealed a different institutional challenge. Government Chief Whip Jane Ruth Aceng told the meeting that 75 NRM MPs and flag bearers were facing election petitions arising from the 2026 general elections and were seeking financial support for legal representation. The courts must determine the petitions. But the request for financial assistance raises a broader governance question. How should political parties support members facing litigation while preserving clear boundaries between party interests, state resources and the institutional independence expected of legislators? Transparency over the source, terms and administration of any financial assistance would therefore be important. Electoral disputes are not simply contests between individual politicians. Their resolution also affects public confidence that elected office is secured and retained through processes that can operate independently of political influence. Another test emerged from the caucus discussion over the Kampala Expressway and toll collections. Aceng reported progress on a Committee on Physical Infrastructure report that recommended criminal investigations by institutions including the Inspectorate of Government, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, the Criminal Investigations Directorate, and the Uganda Revenue Authority. The next questions are practical: Did the institutions act on the recommendations? Were investigations opened? Did the agencies responsible respond? Was any public money recovered? These questions illustrate a recurring weakness in measuring parliamentary performance. A committee can investigate. It can summon officials. It can produce a detailed report and make recommendations. But if nobody tracks what happens afterwards, the public is left measuring parliamentary activity rather than parliamentary impact. That distinction may ultimately define how the 12th Parliament should be judged. Uganda’s political debate sometimes treats strong oversight as the opposite of strong government. Institutionally, however, the two do not necessarily conflict. If parliamentary scrutiny identifies corruption in the Parish Development Model and government fixes it, service delivery improves. If a committee exposes waste and the money is recovered, the state benefits. If MPs identify weaknesses in legislation before it becomes law, government may avoid expensive mistakes later. Accountability, viewed this way, is not simply an adversarial exercise. It is one mechanism through which government can improve its own performance. That gives Museveni’s October instruction to MPs to return to communities and establish what is actually happening an institutional significance beyond party mobilization. The question is whether Parliament can turn such political instructions into durable systems of accountability that operate regardless of who occupies State House, who becomes Speaker or which party commands the majority. In its first 100 days, 12th Parliament has established its committees and its leadership has stated its objectives. The next stage is establishing publicly accessible evidence against which those promises can be assessed. One possibility would be an annual parliamentary accountability report organized around five questions: What did Parliament legislate? What did Parliament scrutinize? What public money did its interventions protect or recover? Which government programmes did MPs verify? And, most importantly, what changed because Parliament intervened? Such mechanisms would shift the assessment of Parliament away from personalities, speeches and political confrontation towards measurable institutional performance.The post Parliament’s 100-Day test appeared first on The Observer Media Ltd.