A donkey is more useful.

My animus against the Senate knows no abatement. It has become an albatross, bringer of extremely catastrophic luck. Senators, led by the Majority Leader, have turned their bilious eye on the what was left of the drinking public's freedom and decided that alcoholic beverages will be consumed within an ever shorter list of venues. Pretty soon, they will make it a capital crime to consume alcohol if one has ever sired (or given birth) to a child. They were an annoyance a year ago; they have become pests today. It is time we redirected their efforts to sleeping the year away in their two-hundred-thousand-shillings apiece seats.

Sociologists will tell you that when it comes to social vices like smoking and drinking, it is vital to change the behaviour of your target than to simply bang on and on about the evils of the vice. Kenya has completely skipped the tried and tested methods for reducing risks related to drinking or smoking; it has found a source of revenue though. The raison d'être of the Alcoholic Beverages Control Act and the Tobacco Control Act, but more the former than the latter, is revenue, whether the revenue is raised from permits and licenses or from penalties and fines. It has become a perverse situation that for a period, bar owners and their patrons were seen as cash machines by the police and the State alike.

But the insinuation of the Senate into this affair is proof positive that it continues to misapply its collective mind to what it needs to do. There was a hint of this when it consistently failed to appreciate the proper interpretation of the Constitution and the County Governments Act when it came to the wash-rinse-repeat impeachments of Embu's Martin Wambora. And it is the faux-intellectuals like the Majority Leader who epitomise this problem; the Bills he is proposing demonstrate that he needs to go back to the core business of the Senate: sleep for half the year and rouse yourself only when the budget is being considered.

Arguably the smartest lawyer in the Senate knows that it is a chamber for slumber. He rarely opens his mouth, bar one or two sing-for-your-political-supper appearances at ill-advised political rallies. For the most part though, he keeps a low profile, trousers his salary (which he looks at as a pittance) and stays as far away from the lunacy of drafting incredibly foolish pieces of legislation as he can. He is the paragon of a good Senator. And should the day the good people of Busia require his legislative intervention, I suspect he will still find a constitutional wiggle to pass the buck to the Busia members of the National Assembly; after all, those ones have the Constituencies Development Fund and a tight-fisted grip on the appropriations process.

The Majority Leader should take a leaf from the Busia Senator and relax. Regardless of how much glory he thinks he'll cover himself in by his leadership of the Majority Party in the Senate, the day every Kenyan politician dreams of will not come for him: we are not going to elect him President of Kenya. We, in the words of the good people of Makueni as we elected Mutula Kilonzo, Jr. would rather elect a donkey. It would be much more useful to us.