By Peter Wanyonyi
For all the credit that goes to Greece for providing the foundations of democracy, it is the French who gave us the modern republic, with its citizens’ rights and the equality of leaders and citizens before the law.
That is the romantic view of things from the 21st Century. But things weren’t always so rosy.
The French Revolution — which gave birth to this model of governance and the accompanying social company — was a bloody affair in which the royal family of France was butchered and the entire ruling class decimated by a citizenry enraged by the greed and gluttony of their leaders.
And it wasn’t just in France, and not just hundreds of years ago, that this happened.
Shot dead
In Ghana, MPs and the president had taken to misruling the country without compunction in the years after independence. Finally, in 1979, the citizens got tired of it all. Led by Jerry Rawlings, a group of army young turks overthrew the government of the day, lined up the overthrown leaders on an Accra beach one crisp morning, and shot all of them dead.
The results of this are instructive. France, with a GDP 35 times that of Kenya, pays its MPs the equivalent of Sh700,000 a month — and this amount is taxed in entirety. Ghana, whose GDP is roughly the same as Kenya’s, pays its MPs less than Sh150,000 a month each. And they don’t have the power to increase their salaries.
Funds
The MPs in France and Ghana and countless other places have a painful history to look back upon. They realise they are sent to parliament not to make money and steal public funds, but to help fashion laws that ensure the citizens are free to grow wealthy and happy and fat.
We are watching.
