Shed the joyriders first.

The self-indulgent calls by the mandarins of the Salaries and Remuneration Commission and the vacuum-sealed presidential ass-kissers that there is a need for the "public wage bill to be trimmed" seems not to have un-hardened the hearts of the rank-and-file of the public service, especially those to be found in the creepy crawl-ways of the national Executive. The mutterings among them is that they are not giving up "even a single allowance" in the name of trimming the wage bill. Among the militant runs the refrain, "Kama Serem anataka kurudisha pesa serikali, arudishe peke yake."

There is a realisation that the Government of Kenya cannot pay all its bills, and the ones it chooses to pay seem to be very very unusual indeed. It is rumoured in the dingy bits of the National Treasury that because the GoK has had a hard time persuading judges in foreign jurisdictions that the Anglo-Leasing contracts were fraudulent, that billions of shillings must be factored into the national budget to settle the ruinous awards made against the GoK. There is a certain sense of futility over the shady toing-and-froing over the laptops-for-tots tender, with potentially ruinous questions being raised about why a dodgy supplier of mulika-mwizi-type phones somehow managed to finagle itself the tender at a price inflated by 1.4 billion shillings. (It must be with relief that parliamentary committees and URP malcontents are now walking in lock-step with the President regarding the Chinese railway.)

But the bills that need paying, such as salaries for doctors, teachers, nurses and university dons, don't seem to have vouchers ready for presentation. After all, these people are simply eating the GoK out of home and hearth with their heartless demands for more despite the looming starvation in Kenya's forgotten frontiers in the North. These people are so ungrateful that they will spite their employer in the name of "solidarity" even when that solidarity has nothing in common with Poland.

The bills of its armies of apparatchiks, mandarins, nawabs and nabobs are paid on time and in full. The chairpersons, vice-chairpersons, members and chief executives of commissions, the holders of independent offices, the "elected" representatives, the Principal, and Cabinet, Secretaries, the chiefs of this, that or the other, the bosses-in-truffles, of state-owned companies...all these characters, their gardeners, cooks and armed police guards are paid on time and in full. Not to mention their cars, drivers, fuel, mileage, hardship, inconvenience...the list of things that we have found to pay for when it comes to these cohorts is staggering by its length and creativeness.

There is, of course, the legacy of the hundreds of thousands of "friends of the President" who have been padding the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Database for years, even decades. It is a pernicious legacy. It is the stinging nettle that Sarah Serem and her cohort of hatchet-people have refused to grapple. She may be philanthropic enough to "give back" 10% of her sitting allowance (not the it-won't-fit-in-my-purse salary, though), but until she and her fellow hatchet-wielders in the national Executive train their sights on the IPPD, we will be talking about trimming the fat till the fat cats come home.