It's MPs vs mice in game of who is poorer now

Bunge Chronicles: Aden Duale pleads for broke Waheshimiwa. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Aden Duale sprang from his seat moments before Bunge debated the Finance Bill on Tuesday afternoon. He had an announcement to make. He had figured out why wahesh were broke.

Like a man recently parted with his money, the Garissa Township MP had dug deep into his memory trying to remember all instances when him and his colleagues had spent their hard-earned coins. Alas, he recalled that they hadn’t spent any money because they had none in the first place.

Duale knew who to blame — the hard-hearted Treasury people who refused to give wahesh their pocket money. “It is embarrassing to be in the newspaper (because we are broke). And it is true (that we are broke),” Duale lamented before the speaker cut him short.

“They are not appreciating that you (MPs) have to survive — to breathe and breathe hard,” Speaker Justin Muturi consoled him, revealing that the wahesh were too impoverished to breathe as they pleased (code for snoring inside Bunge).

Many had kept out of the chamber earlier, knowing that there wouldn’t be enough air to produce the loudest sound, hence the quorum hitch at the start of the sitting.

Speaker Muturi had earlier said the Finance Bill would guide the process to finance whatever the wahesh “had already supplied or claimed to supply”, which — as Duale had discovered — was nothing, given that the MPs depended meekly on someone else to offer them crumbs.

It is not unusual for our wahesh to be broke every once in a while. The only difference is that their ‘brokeness’ is nothing like that of the ordinary mwananchi. It is what an online meme-lord described as ‘broque’ — broke but not really broke. And it showed on Friday when Wilson Sossion paraded his family at a several-star hotel to quit one of his two jobs. No truly broke person would dare do that. Tearfully, Sossion almost announced that he did not need the extra money as he closed the trade unionist chapter of his life.

Back to the cash-strapped Bunge. It is no joke that the august House, in its entirety, is competing with church mice on who is the poorer. And the wahesh might have an edge given that they cannot afford a decent internet connection. 

Bunge’s YouTube channel has been acting up for a while now. Every so often, it skips scenes, cutting off the wahesh mid-sentence and abruptly moves on to the next speaker.

Speaker Muturi had the perfect phrase for it: “short-circuiting procedure.” Oddly, it imitates some wahesh who make lofty promises to wananchi and disappear for five years, skipping the service-delivery scene. They only resurface at the tail-end of their terms carrying bundles of crisp Sh50 notes to cater to the needs of beggarly constituents.