By Peter Nguli
NAIROBI, KENYA: It appears that after the last elections, it is only the forest that has changed but the monkeys have stayed the same.
Like the previous members, our legislatures are demanding higher salaries to fill their stomachs as Kenyans dig deep into their pockets to make ends meet and pay their hefty undeserving perks out of their hard earned salaries. We say enough is enough loud and clear.
I have a question: how does an employee determine his own salary and when the boss refuses the employee threaten to sack the boss? This is the message our legislators are sending to the Salaries and Renumeration Committe (SRC) who put a cap of their salaries at almost 600,000 shillings per month, a fortune for what less than 80 per cent of Kenyans earn.
Kenya may urgently need a legislation whereby the greedy MPigs are barred from discussing salary issues. We wish to ask the SRC not to be cowed but to stand firm for all Kenyans are behind them. Indeed, we want their salaries to be reduced further because at the moment the wage bill is too high against our GDP.
For its not just earning salary, our MPs do not understand the economic terms; its about the economy and our wage bill is about 12 per cent higher than the UN internationally calculated 7 per cent as His Excellency the president Uhuru Kenyatta rightly said recently.
I tend to think that our president is an economist. For money is not harvested from trees, it is earned and it is about figures here, it is about inflation, it is about growth, and it is about GDP .
Many MPs do not understand this: they think money can be fished from a river or ocean like fish because they have no economic background.
In that sense, I totally agree with President Uhuru Kenyatta; the wage bill is too high and we need economic cuts in order to save our economy so we maintain our slot as the East and Central Africa's economic powerhouse and one of the fastest growing economies in the world according to the World Bank 2012 report. In these economic cuts, we will be in together as one.
Kenya is still a developing poor country and over 50 per cent live below a dollar per day meaning the average income is shs 3000 per month. Further, many Kenyans live on one meal per day, living in poor impoverished conditions. There are many people in Kenya who sleep hungry because they cannot afford a meal by any means. Many workers live on hands to mouth phenomenon. With these people, transport, breakfast, lunch, sugar and milk is a luxury. These legislators need to know that the Kenyan average worker has to work very hard in order to pay taxes for the Mps
The tenth parliament was among the highest paid in the world earning over ten thousand US dollars per month, far above the British Prime Minister in a country whose GDP is too small to be written in black and white. Yet one, the South Igembe legislator, Mr. Mithika Linturi does not feel the shame of collecting signatures to file a petition to increase their pay. Does he really know that there are Kenyans who slept hungry last night? Has he himself slept hungry for once?
Enough is enough. We want to remind our legislators, governors, senators and others that we, the voters, are their employers and we want quality services and not demanding salary increment even before they have been sworn in, and long before they have even entered in the legislative chamber.
