Legislators truly deserve pay rise

We have all been so pre-occupied with the impending teachers’ strike over an outstanding 300 per cent pay hike that we forgot a bigger travesty happening right beneath our noses. Our MPs are starving.

True, we have just moved them to a new chamber, which was refurbished at the cost of only Sh1 billion. Indeed we gave them brand new seats that we got on the cheap at only Sh200,000 because they were cleverly manufactured by prison labour, which is largely free.

We threw in gizmos to enable members to raise substantive points of order without rising to their feet. We are even in the process of getting them new offices and stuff. But what of use are all these when the stomach is rumbling?

Note that the last time we reviewed our leaders’ salaries was in 2003, when we raised their pay to a miserable Sh200,000. It is a good thing, we allowed them to take home another Sh651,000 in allowances. How did we expect them to survive on Sh200,000?

Since then, we have ignored them, instead handing out fat salary increments to policemen, who do nothing but shake down matatus for bribes, and teachers who make money from holiday tuition anyway.

Spread development

The problem is that most Kenyans have this mistaken view that MPs are a bunch of parasitic loudmouths who are out to drain scarce national resources. How dim. In less than five years, they have passed an unprecedented 96 Bills, including 12 private member Bills.

Guess what the Permanent Secretary, a small man who does dot, a fellow that a Parliamentary Committee can summon and he arrives shaking life a leaf, has been wallowing in a Sh1.3 million pay package. Since when did servants start blowing more money than their masters?

It even gets worse. KRA Commissioners, very junior civil servants whose only job is harass landlords because they have spectacularly failed to raise one trillion shillings, which MPs desperately require to spread development to the grassroots, get paid more.

Even that lawyer, whose only job is to call a press conference once a month to whine when MPs are implementing the Constitution for the maximum benefit of citizens, earns more.

It is a total outrage. And is not like MPs are illiterate. Why, 51 per cent of them have degrees, a feat that most high schools can’t achieve considering that the majority of their staff never went beyond high school. And 29 per cent of the MPs in Parliament have masters degrees, while massive six per cent have doctorates. Imagine.

It is not fair. It is stupid for us to think we are doing MPs a favour by paying them peanuts while working them to the bone. We are clearly taking them for granted. Unless we are careful, they will troop back to public universities.

Their masters degrees and doctorates will earn them ten times more than that insulting stipend we dole out to honourable and distinguished members each month.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

 

African gods must be in deep slumber

Something is a miss. Martin Shikuku dug his own grave eight years ago; the sort of reckless madness that can upset departed spirits into wiping out a whole community. And what did the gods do? Nothing.

In normal circumstances, the man should have collapsed hours after. But he lived on for eight years, bouncing grandchildren on his knees, chatting with his sons in distant lands on his mobile phone until cancer, which has nothing to do with curses, came along.

In his adopted village in Kiminini, his actions caused consternation. He risked striking women barren and rendering men impotent, or worse. Yet not even chickens perished, unless they were dispatched by the knife when in-laws came calling.

In Mt Kenya, home of fierce spirits, the Mungiki were felled like flies by police bullets, when common sense dictated that they should have been immune, courtesy of the gods. Those with good memory will recall that not too long ago in the same area, a mad man cut down a sacred Mugumo tree. Nothing happened to him. Nothing.

Down at the Coast, people have made sacred kayas a political playground where foreigners, who by ancient fiat are not supposed to set foot in the hallowed grounds, came to be garlanded in preparation for wars that the gods had not decreed. 

In Western, politicians routinely scoff at and ignore the Luhya Council of elders. And the Luhya gods do nothing. In Nyanza, it should have been sacrilege when a young man purported to install an elder man as the Chairman of the Luo Council of elders, a man with the powers of a seer.  But the gods, alas, only winked.