The Kenyan tax payers are a very unlucky lot. They will never get it right with their elected leaders. Despite voting massively to remove one lot after another since the Ninth Parliament, any set of MPs they bring in will as if programmed, instantly resort to plotting how to fleece the treasury.
How come since we changed Moi’s regime in 2002, we have been electing a hungry and greedy set of leaders to our Parliament? How come that during the Tenth Parliament, only Johnson Muthama saw the need to pay his taxes yet even the Speaker of the National Assembly who pocketed more money than Muthama avoided taxation like a plague?
Is there a chance that we can amend the constitution to elect Kenyans who are ready to serve the country as volunteers because they have made their wealth elsewhere? Or better still, can we peg elected leaders’ pay to their level of education and pay them in line with civil servants and other public servants? Why pay a Form Four school dropout the same salary as a professor just because both are MPs?
As a Kenyan, I have been thoroughly embarrassed to see some of our newly elected members of Parliament and county representatives clamor for more pay even before they perform an honest day’s work. It is hurting to see those who were regular folks just the other day clamoring for more money than the 79K they have been awarded as county reps.
Suddenly they want to live in posh areas of urban centers where rents are in the scale of 80K per month. If indeed the 79K they are being paid cannot meet their monthly expenses, how did they manage their lives all these years? What posh jobs did they leave to join politics? What has suddenly happened to the public schools and hospitals they used to go to? Were they elected to serve Kenyans or to lead lavish lifestyles using public funds?
It is this same opulence that angered Kenyans so much when the Tenth Parliament was hell bent on ripping the Treasury of Sh2 billion before Parliament was dissolved. The wrath of the Kenyan voter sent 180 of them packing thinking that all would be well with the new people’s representatives. We were wrong again.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with county reps, governors, MPs and senators asking for a decent pay to cater for their needs. However, they must remember the state of the economy and how the rest of the 40 million Kenyans live. If you doubt me, travel to Turkana, West Pokot, Central Province and Nyanza where abject poverty is still king.
Our treasury is not a bottomless pit. Our taxes cannot merely be levied to be spent lavishly on a few elected leaders. When the economy improves, the issue can be revisited. Until then, they can do well to focus on the job that took them to parliament or county assembly.
I can understand if former MPs and Cabinet ministers who used to earn 1000k a month have had their salaries slashed to just over 500k. Obviously they will need some adjusting to do. However, this Salary Remuneration Commission rationalization did not come as a surprise to them. They knew all along that the public service wage bill had run amok, thanks to the greed of the august house.
To tell you the truth, frequent upward adjustment of salaries for MPs, sometimes without any justification was the reason we had so many wild cat labour strikes in Kenya in the last five years. If teachers were not on the streets, professors, doctors and nurses were carrying placards demanding haki yao. If civil servants were not downing their tools, the police were grumbling and engaging in go slow protests. It was because they could not understand why they should take home 10k per month while MPs who worked three days a week took home 1000k a month!
The other day I saw a newspaper report that alleged that the public service spends over Ks 4 billion in tea and flowers a year. One wonders what Ks 4 billion would do to the people of Turkana who are perpetually in abject poverty.
This country needs more super highways than just Thika Highway. We need working modern railway and commuter buses in our cities. We need security, food sufficiency, healthcare, better classrooms, books, laptops and enough teachers for our schools. We need more trained doctors, nurses, lab technicians, medical equipment and medicines for our hospitals and clinics.
Kenyans are dying in their thousands due to the inadequacy of the police force to man traffic on our roads or simply to shield us from external terrorist attacks. We need more money to train and deploy more police officers, buy faster moving police vehicles to properly keep surveillance on our highways and net criminals before they plant bombs in our cities. We need cash to manage perennial floods!
We need more money to provide universal healthcare for all Kenyans at home and abroad. This universal healthcare will make Kenya a healthy and productive nation. The more reason we cannot waste our limited resources on a group of people whose output has always been difficult to quantify.
Jerry Okungu is a Media Consult
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