By Peter Wanyonyi
We are all in a tizzy over nothing, it seems. The MPs want to be paid a million shillings per month and we are acting all financially frigid for some reason.
This is probably silly and there is a good solution. You see, Kenyan villagers in their infinite and grounded wisdom saw to it that government was expanded massively under the new Constitution.
What has not expanded, however, is the pot of gold that Kenya produces. Our industries are the same, the number of taxpayers is the same, and the number of farms producing eggs for export hasn’t changed.
It follows that we cannot conceivably afford to pay the MPs and their newcomer cousins — county governors and their busybody county-assembly kith, as well as their senate kin — a penny more from this same pot.
This is why we should have a contest to determine who gets paid and who doesn’t. This would actually work. Every month, we would have a legislating contest between MPs and senators. We would first of all take all the money meant to pay legislators and their sidekicks — from the counties to the president — and lump it all into one pot.
Criteria
After that, we would develop various criteria for qualifying to earn from this pot. For example, most active legislator, most productive legislator, most boring legislator, the legislator who sleeps the least during proceedings, the legislators with the least number of children — we are trying to maintain a low population growth rate, thank you very much — and the one whose county or constituency comes top in KCPE.
To spice things up, we would then select a committee made up of the homeless and hopeless to be the judging panel.
That shouldn’t be too difficult. Even as the 359 MPs get Sh7 million each to buy a car, four million Kenyans continue to live in slums and eke out a living on a pittance. But let’s not let this bother us, shall we?
Lottery
The judging panel would select a maximum of 100 legislators to share half of that month’s legislative pot of gold, with the rest going unpaid and having to wait for the following month.
To make it even sexier, we could take the remaining amount and run a lottery with it, with eligibility being reserved for those who are homeless, jobless or both.
This would ensure that the wealth in Kenya at least gets spread roughly evenly. A few deserving legislators get their pay, the rest of them go home empty-handed, and the poor, jobless and homeless masses of Kenya also have a go at the cash.
But reward is nothing without punishment. Even in primary schools, laggard pupils are either expelled or forced to repeat classes.
We would need to impose this on our legislators. Just as we select the top 100 and pay them, we would every month nominate 100 poorly performing MPs to fire. In three months flat, we would have zero MPs and zero problems. Not a bad!
