We’ve reached the point someone told us, choices have consequences

By BARRACK MULUKA

A hungry man is an angry man. This is what everyone in privilege and authority must never forget. Our people say that even a hungry rodent pushed beyond a certain point of tolerance will pounce at the fiercest lion. They advise the lions of this world never to lose sight of this law of nature.

I wrote in this column a few weeks ago that when people have nothing to eat, they would eat their government. After they have eaten up their government, they will eat their country. Sometimes they eat the two concurrently. We must never forget this, even as we tighten the tax noose around the neck of the patient Kenyan citizen.

The dreaded new Value Added Tax (VAT) regulations became effective on Monday this week. Our solution to addressing poverty is to tax it. Thus we address all the problems in the national exchequer by ever rising and expanding taxation. We don’t create new wealth or create jobs. We go back to the same old quarry. We scrape it as mercilessly as possible. We don’t ask whether this can be sustained.

Paying tax is of course a noble thing. Without this we should stall. You cannot build your own roads and hospitals, or have your own defence force and police force (although we know that some wealthy goons have tried this). We each must contribute to the national exchequer to build our essential services’ base, if nothing else. Yet, is the tax scenario in the country a little frightening?

The lower income tax (PAYE) brackets sit between 15 and 25 per cent, for people earning up to just below Sh38,000 per month. Once you hit this figure, you must give 30 per cent of your income to the taxman. They say you are rich. And the rich must pay. So the revenue authority will take Sh11,400 as PAYE. You are left with Sh26,600. If you went to buy food with this balance, a handsome Sh4,256 of this balance would go to the taxman. This means that Sh15,656 of your earnings went to the government, leaving you Sh22,344. In effect you gave 41.2 per cent of your income to the government, just slightly less than half of your salary. This is just the very minimum you give to the government, depending on what you do with your money. Remember you are a rich man, earning Sh38,000 a month.

Now it is very annoying when you consider what they do with your money. With some of it, they pay grotesque salaries to Members of Parliament. Think of that again. From a skinny salary of Sh38,000, Sh15,656 is taken away to contribute to an MP’s luxury. They pay him Sh1 million, including your contribution. And, together with his colleagues, the MP determines how and when to make more inroads into your remaining Sh22,344.

When your tax is not paying the MP, it is going into a multiple billion shillings kitty to fund Independence Day celebrations. Or it just buys an office for a retired president, for say Sh700 million. This is unless someone leaks this information to the media. Alternatively, your money could renovate a brand new house for a Deputy President. Or it could hire an expensive jet for him, when he goes on mysterious missions. Alternatively, it could go towards building the gilded statue of a retired president. They should show him carrying a Constitution that the political class does not believe in.

This offends. It however gets more annoying when the taxed cannot put food on the table. Sometimes there is even no table to put food or anything else on, anyway. Such is the life of a Kenyan citizen.

But away from Kenya’s political leaders’ curious appetites, what someone is not telling us is that this country is broke. I have a hypothesis. I suspect the previous government, for whatever reason, spent our last broken coin. The new government found an empty kitty. However, this government is shy. It cannot tell us the truth.

Yet things are set to get worse. I see that the Kenya Government is now ready for a show down with the international community. Through its MPs, Jubilee has fired the first shot in Parliament. They will clearly be trying to defy the ICC. From a purely human platform, I appreciate President Kenyatta and DP William Ruto’s predicament. Those fellows at The Hague can jail you. Make no mistake. That Hague thing is a political court. They set it up exactly for that purpose – to jail people who think that they are so powerful that the law in their own country cannot touch them. This court acts almost as if it is God, where the Prophet Isaiah has said of him, “He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this earth to nothing. No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown no sooner do they take root in the ground than he blows on them and they wither and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff (Isaiah 40:24).”

Make no mistake. The ICC can jail a sitting president or his deputy, just to pass across a message. So what do you do? Do you defy it? Do you pull out? Or do you just go there and pray for the best? Let us say that we have now reached the point that someone told us of, that choices have consequences. Go to The Hague and risk jail for 30 years and suffer humiliation on the way to jail. Stay away and wait for a warrant of arrest and become a prisoner confined to your country and a few rogue states.

Amid all this, face still international sanctions. One way or the other, however, the ICC is going to push Kenya’s economy into even deeper and dire straits. If you think the cost of living has just shot through the roof, you have not yet seen anything. An unthinking Parliament whose members process their thoughts in the large intestines has only thrown the spanner in the works. Drive carefully, hard times ahead.