The Parliament that slumbered while Kenyans endured the sweltering heat of injustice.

photo of the Kenyan National Assembly

September 20^th, 2018 will go down in the annals of history as the day parliament made life unbearable for Kenyans, a majority of whom spend less than a dollar a day.

In a country plagued by maternal deaths, hunger, famine, floods, threats of terrorism, unemployment, poor sanitation, poor drainage, huge public debt, runaway wage bill, corruption, tribalism, housing problem among other problems, the financial bill that is now law, is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. 

After every single clause of the presidential memorandum was passed in parliament, without an organized and united opposition front, Kenyans have had the displeasure of having to be hoodwinked by some members of parliament who pretentiously ‘fought’ for the rejection of the 8% VAT among a raft of taxes brought before parliament. 

It is my honest opinion that the parliamentarians played us blind. Especially the ones who came out to oppose the financial bill. 

To say that there was any sense of honor from whichever side on the floor of the house, is to peddle propaganda, and that, I distance myself from. 

To say that the 12^th Parliament reserves the right to be called august is to laugh at Kenya’s misfortune.

Why perhaps do I maintain that the majority of members who opposed the finance bill on the floor of the national assembly acted rather hypocritically?

From the offset, the notorious finance bill was introduced in parliament way back in 2013. This is proof that the bill did not creep up on our ‘unsuspecting’ MPs, they had it all along. 

This was during the tenure of the 11^th parliament whose composition did not change much when the 12^th parliament took over. Besides don’t they say a constitutional office operates on the basis of continuity? – implying that the institution of legislature is not defined by its membership. Regardless of the office bearers. 

Therefore, the question is posed on why the parliamentarians who are basically the same ones during the 11^th parliament could not do away with the finance bill altogether then. They surely had the power to repeal sections of the bill that they were not satisfied with.  

Another hypocritical gesture is the failure on the part of the opposing MPs to rally like-minded colleagues to remain inside parliamentary chambers.

If truly they were against the 8% VAT, why couldn’t they remain sited in the chambers? – They had to walk to the door where they knew that Kimani (MP) would shove them out of parliament chambers. Also they just had to move out to the toilets where they knew the door would be locked from outside.

The theatre went on when the very MPs purporting to oppose the bill refused to log out of the electronic machine that consequently had a wrong count of (353) members in the house. 

Had they logged out, the system would have been used for the electronic vote in order to obtain a proper count and quorum. They clearly did not wish to vote. 

According to the head count conducted (after MPs refused to use the electronic means) the total number of MPs in the house was 215. This number was much lower than the number needed to ‘veto’ the bill. 

215 was the number of all the MPs in the house (MPs opposing and supporting) but in order to reject the bill, 233 members had to oppose the bill. 

From the statistics provided it is true that the opposing side did not gunner the 2/3 majority needed to reject the bill, hence all the clauses in the bill passed with ease. 

More of the insincere acts were witnessed when members of parliament started shouting ‘Duale Must Go’. First, this is against parliamentary procedure. Secondly, this statement is foreign to parliament because the Majority Leader cannot be impeached in parliament.

Duale can only be recalled by the Jubilee Party just as it was the case with the recall of Senator Wetangula as senate minority leader.

MPs who felt ‘dissatisfied’ with speaker Justine Muturi’s conduct vowed to take up the matter in court in order to stop the implementation of the 8% VAT. 

What they don’t realize, however, is that the bill they seek to bring down is already law and as such gives an allocation of 1.5 Billion to the Judiciary.