What came of 'Pangani Six' promise of cells reforms?

After the Pangani Six left the cells, they promised that never again would the facilities remain so dangerous to human health.

Police holding cells and prisons are exactly as the colonial government left them 54 years after the President Jomo Kenyatta became Prime Minister.

The lice in newly issued prison uniforms hit the walls with audible sounds when you shake the uniforms, according to one former inmate.

Other vermin like bedbugs eat the prisoners until they bleed all over. This country does not care about the downtrodden and the incarcerated. It is a fact.

Kenyans trusted the politicians. Little did they know that they were conning them. When the politicians from CORD and Jubilee jointly declared “never again”, many were falsely comforted that their loved ones would at long last be spared the indignity of animal life in Kenya’s notorious prisons and police holding cells, which qualify for investigation by the UN bodies and other global human rights organisations.

A country that boasts of a parliamentary budgetary system should not have any problems reforming and cleaning these dirty, stinking and uninhabitable facilities.

MPs like Moses Kuria and Johnstone Muthama could have arranged parliamentary supplementary budget to include vote items like fumigation services, new uniforms, blankets, beds, building of decent toilets and bathrooms, tap water, sinks and other amenities like visitors’ chambers. They have of course done nothing.

What politics can be more important than this? But in Kenya, our misdirected politicians argue and quarrel all day about power, bribes and sleaze.

HUGE BUDGET

Everything is about their stomachs. Nothing about anybody else. What is the point of having over 260 legislators who can never articulate anything to do with the most disadvantaged in our society like prisoners, remandees and street families?

Has this society surrendered so much to Satan who mocks God when his people are suffering humiliation under a Government organized to do exactly that?

 A country that spends almost half of its annual budget on civil servants’ pocket money, trips abroad, training, lunches, dinners, outright theft and other allowances should think twice when making her budget.

The over Sh450 billion used for the comfort of civil servants must be cut in half and shared with prisoners, remandees, street families and other vulnerable groups like those left destitute by cattle rustling.

The least the budgetary process can do is to connect all Kenyans to safe drinking water at arms-length and public housing.

A closer look at the way Kenya’s budgetary process is engineered betrays a document that is highly unfair, irregular, ugly, uncaring and unconstitutional.

Yet it is the role of elected legislators who represent the people to right these historical injustices by changing the way evil bureaucrats at Treasury rig the budget against the people, and in their favour.

This bureaucratic cartel is the most disruptive system in our economy because they make sure they ring-fence over Sh450 billion annually to splash on themselves in the name of ‘recurrent expenditure’.

The Pangani Six should come together and do a press conference to either offer the waiting country an apology or give us a road map of how they will reform not just our bad prisons but also the entire unfair criminal justice system.