Parliament must keep the bar high to redeem image

Edmund Burke, the celebrated 18th Century British statesman, was setting very high standards indeed when he said: “Parliament is not a Congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a Member of Bristol but a Member of Parliament”.

Kenya’s Parliament has had quite a chequered history with a rather intriguing cycle from the heady post-independence decade when the likes of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Masinde Muliro, Argwings Kodhek, Martin Shikuku, Jean Marie Seroney, Tom Mboya and JM Kariuki,  et al, lit up the House with stirring nationalist displays that would ultimately land virtually all of them in the furnace of the Biblical Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego proportions.