Cash melts senators’ hearts, easily trumps sense

The Senate stalemate over a new revenue-sharing formula that could have seen some counties gain and others suffer a reduction on amounts of money they received in the 2019-2020 financial year was resolved not by persuasive logic about fairness, justice and equity in resource distribution.

It was settled because President Uhuru Kenyatta put an extra Sh50 billion on the table to allow the implementation of a sharing formula mooted more than a year ago!

What the President did was not new. He simply bribed the senators to unlock a stalemate that was threatening to paralyse operations in the counties. And it was not only the cash promise that seems to have restored some order in the Senate. There are believable claims some may have been induced directly.

The bribing instinct is so ingrained in the political and social psyche it is hard to imagine how Kenyans will be weaned off it. We vote in a certain way because we are “promised” development.

This is not necessarily a bad thing because, at the end of the day, transforming people’s lives must involve a qualitative change of their physical environments. That change cannot, however, be “injected” into the environment. Change starts with the people, by enabling them to acquire the capacity to appreciate, demand, enjoy and control that change.

Literate youth

So, whether a county gets less or more money is immaterial if its citizens are ignorant of their rights and cannot enjoy the tarmac roads or electricity in their houses. Fancy hospitals will be meaningless if their health-seeking behaviour is defined by the most basic denominator of what herbs work to alleviate pain. And building schools that are conveyor belts of barely literate youth is not exactly flowering the landscape with buds that will bloom into science or arts icons!

Nowhere is this irony demonstrated more powerfully than in the reality of thousands of retirees that, after serving for many years in whatever capacity, transition into a post-employment life of serious deprivation. This explains the pathetic attempt by MPs to legislate a handsome monthly retirement pay for themselves and their predecessors.

These are elected representatives with the heavy responsibility of providing leadership and arguing the case for national investments to be made in areas of greatest impact. They do not and hence continue to fail their people.

They are expected to be championing Kenya’s adherence to well-intentioned continental commitments like the 2014 Malabo Declaration on agricultural growth and transformation that, inter alia, requires African countries to allocate 10 per cent of their public expenditure to agriculture and end hunger on the continent by 2025.

Development planning

Although the MPs have research assistants to help them contextualise these realities and ground their debates and worldviews on issues more fundamental than what their tribes are getting in the tokenism flaunted as development planning, hardly anyone will demand to know why the government has never met the target it signed on under the 2001 Abuja Declaration to invest 15 per cent of its national budget in health.

President Kenyatta’s legacy projects are all rights that should have been consistently targeted over the years. They are not time-bound gifts that he wants to bequeath Kenyans on his way out. What he should have done was to make investments in agriculture, housing, manufacturing and health a budget priority over the years.

Instead, now that a presidential succession is upon us, determined efforts to control the capacity to dole out the national cake – in the manner that the President has done with senators – have divided the country yet again into fractious units of who better knows what Kenyans need.

Those that think the Constitution is the problem that needs fixing so that we fall in love with each other elections notwithstanding, and those that have reduced Kenya into a nation of hustlers that need wheelbarrows, posho mills and hair dryers to thrive.

 Whether it is marvelling at how easily 50 billion shillings melts the hearts of senators, how the Constitution has been made the villain or how hustling has been elevated to a national redeemer, Kenya truly is in a very bad place.

  [email protected], @tmshindi)