It is very easy to blame the top echelons of the
administration when things seem not to move in the right direction, when the
lives of the poverty-stricken Kenyans do not seem to turn around despite
assurances from the duo jubilee supremos during the tumultuous campaigns. I
wish in this scholarly article to behave like a prophet although I am famous
for quite a number of things but not the gift of prophecy. Like Mutahi Ngunyi,
the king of political science in Kenya I will inform and instruct you, based on
my legal training and you will be required to choose whether to believe it or
throw my rational thoughts to the dustbin. But I guarantee you one single thing,
that I have in the past predicted things that others never saw and history has
always proved me right. The jubilee manifesto may not be fully implemented to
the maximum- as may have been wished by the son of Jomo and the King of the
Rift when they manufactured it, thanks to the greed of our Members of the
National Assembly whose quest for reaping more than they sow has now assumed
gigantic levels.
One thing Kenyans were not told during the oral missiles
exchange between Sarah Serem’s Salaries and Remuneration Commission and
Muturi’s National Assembly was the glaring fact that the members of parliament
were indirectly suggesting that Ksh 532,000 is such a small package of coins to
repay the millions of Kenya shillings they threw out to their dogs in order to
win the dogs’ votes, a result of which is their current presence in the
chambers of parliament. Kenya was a self-proclaimed democracy, in fact the West
sarcastically referred to Kenya as the “island of peace”, “an oasis of
democracy in the vast African desert of old and mushrooming autocracies”.
However, we have plunged ourselves into a sea of turmoil since 2007/2008
post-poll skirmishes, then the Tana Delta tribal clashes, then the Baragoi
massacre and now Members of National Assembly irregular and irresponsible pay
hikes.
Dear
members of the National Assembly,
When Kenyans passed the new constitution in the year
2010 and I suspect all of you were in Kenya then, they wanted to turn over a
new leaf.
While some of you were boarding first class KQ flights
to western capitals in the wake of the promulgation of the new supreme law of
our land, I and a number of other Kenyans below United Nation’s a-dollar-a-day
definition of poverty had nowhere to go and we were there to witness it. To
those of us who have always had this feeling that members of parliament are
being over-paid if the enormity of the work they do is something to go by, we
saw the new constitution as a coup-de-tat against the honorable plutocrats in
parliament that had senselessly amassed a lot of wealth for no reason in this
man-eat-man society. For the first time, the salaries and the general
remunerations of all state officers in the new administration who pretend to
serve the interests of the public when they are on record for serving their
own, was going to be determined by an impartial, above-politics body that
derives its mandate from the people of Kenya aside from having constitutional
reinforcements.
The holy scriptures record that the wise men during the
birth of our Lord Jesus Christ came from the East. Yet National Assembly’s
self-confessed sacrificial lamb Mithika Linturi who comes from the eastern part
of Kenya, against the general principle of the people of the East being wise and
in blatant disregard of the law was not ashamed to present a petition in the
national assembly in a bid to blow the whistle for the already planned
anti-Serem fight to begin in earnest.
We in the streets often have this saying that “you
cannot fight your oppressor if you have the mentality that they are above you”
and that’s why Andrew Okiyah Okoiti Omtatah and other like-minded Kenyans
launched a parallel bid to Occupy Parliament. They are our watchdogs and
national noisemakers. That’s why we can go home and sleep soundly knowing if
anything is amiss in the Lands ministry, we shall wake up in the morning to
find Omtatah with the heaviest padlock in town having locked himself on the
gates of the ministry’s offices, after throwing the keys to the dogs like you
threw your money to us during the campaigns. Please, don’t shower them in the
streets of National Assembly with hot-water commonly ferried by military
trucks. They love us so much more than you guys love Kenya.
The jubilee alliance promised a lot of goodies and
niceties in the campaigns conspicuous among which were free maternal care,
mechanized agriculture to ensure all arable land in Kenya is put under
irrigation and bolus-technology to curb the incessant cattle rustling that has
extended to the cows of Museveni. The two digital boys also promised to fight
tooth and nail to turn around the lives of Kenyans as well as grow the
country’s economy by two digits not to mention the now controversial laptops
for all school going class one kids. And I wish to sadly report to you that
after the meeting between Parliamentary Service Commission and Salaries and
Remuneration Commission in which it is reliably reported that Sarah Serem
finally surrendered and gave in to your demands, the jubilee administration,
despite the best of its intentions will not practically fully deliver on their
agenda to Kenyans within the remaining Four Years and Five months. But we are
so happy that the fimbo of Kenya Revenue Authority is going to chapa us all
without fear or favour and before you celebrate having scooped a larger chunk
of the public coffers, we are watching to see if you will doze in bunge and
pass half-baked legislations. 2017 will be our meet-in-the-battlefield moment.
Like CORD, we shall fight you from outside parliament.
Anyway, Choices have consequences and Kenyans must now
accept and move on.
Ekai Nabenyo is a law student at the university of
Nairobi and blogs at
Informing
Kenyans www.ekainabenyo.blogspot.com
Interesting perspective you have. I must admit I a quite a follower of your blog...It seems we subscribe in the same school of thought..
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