MPs leave House on fire, run after rats

NAIROBI: Imagine that you are in your house and you notice fire starting from a part of the roof.

You have a real chance to fight it using the water in a bucket outside.

But you notice the rats that have been destroying your rafters are running out of the door.

Worse still, the rats have made sleep a nightmare lately. You were angry and feared that they may soon poison you as they have been eating from your plate.

A brainwave hits you and you run after the rodents, leaving the raging fire behind.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is what our Members of the National Assembly have done to us. They are enacting laws to gag and punish the media instead of saving their house.

Might be there is a reason why the English uniquely gave theirs a capital ‘H’.

They have left the fire to chase after poor journalists. The problem to them is not that there is a suffocating stench oozing from their House. No, if your nose picks up the stench, then it should be cut off; for it is all in your imagination.

If someone has spoilt the air around us, it must be some other idiots, but not our Waheshimiwa. It is also a ‘crime’ to talk or report the stench; just hold your nose and live with it.

See, MPs have taken the adult joke to children in the unfortunate event they break wind. Just blame the children for the bad stench, and threaten to whip whoever suspects you.

As adults you have, after all, succeeded in making them believe older people don’t do that. Once the bad stench goes, you can then gleefully claim it was noise from an ogre outside! We could laugh at what the MPs have done, were it not that it is too serious a matter. It goes to the bottom of what is going wrong with our moral judgement as a country.

It spits on the face of why we are getting poor as a nation while trees of corruption flourish.

It explains why we have many fat cats around; all idling around and licking their mouths. No, it is painful, these cats left the house to burn to chase and feed on the fleeing rats.

Nothing bears value any more; other than the amount they are able to steal and profit from.

Call them as many names as you want, but they call graft a smart career move for it pays back. It is what gets them elected. Poor us, we will be waiting for their campaign bribes in the next poll.

They laugh at you because you buy the decoy that they are after an errant and injudicious media.

They have convinced you they mean well and lately, they even claim that they have direct prayer lines to God.

When they want to stop The Hague cases, they just go to any corner of Kenya and dial Him. They also claim to be patriotic and need to protect Kenyans from the lies of ravenous journalists.

What they don’t tell you is what they seek to achieve in the punitive laws they just passed.

See, the lure of corruption is getting so sweet and each of them is looking for a slice of it. So let us go back to the cats and learn a thing or two from their medieval table manners.

First, they hiss and scratch when another approaches as they chew their latest kill.

They have perfected the art of doing these two acts without dropping their succulent prey. If you go near the fat, hissing cat, you may end up in a hospital bed or a morgue’s slab. See, the MPs have decided that there is such a crime as defaming a whole House. That it is criminal to subject their activities to the test of accountability and audit.

That no organ of State can be invited to investigate claims of corruption in this House. That journalists who transgress this boundary are liable to a Sh500,000 fine and even more. The same vengeance awaits activists and wananchi (whistleblowers) who cross this line.

They long killed clauses in law setting academic standards and discouraging party defections.

They have also voted a thousand times to raise their own salaries and allowances. They have cut corners with the new laws so much and reinstated an imperial Presidency.

They have stolen so much by way of mileage claims, sitting allowances and tenders. The fat cats even now boast to control all tenders and supplies through the infamous ‘tyranny of numbers’.

They claim they are ‘eating’ because even those senior to them are on the take, big time. That is why they are not keen on saving their House, they think the fire can wait for them.

In short, Kenya is burning and maybe, the fire-brigade we are waiting for is the common man.

Soon he will say “enough is enough” and do what Jesus did to save his Temple.

Mathew 21:12: ‘Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.’ Amen.

It is now over to the Senate.