Leeches in Sheep's Clothing.

If you have a wife, and you hold down a decent job that calls for hard-chargin' till the wee hours of the morning, and you neglect that wife, surely as the sun rises and sets I will not put my hand in my pocket to give your wife a stipend because "she is lonely" because of the long hours you put in your work. If you are a member of the County Assembly of Embu, and you have reasonable facility with English grammatical syntax, and your degree of comprehension of simple English sentences is above room temperature, know this: I am not paying your wife "compensation" for loneliness! Not now, not ever!

Let me turn my bilious attention to wives of Governors. First, you are not "first ladies"; this is not the United States of America. Second, your husbands are not and shall never be the equals of the President of the Republic; the only "disciplined forces" they command are the rabble we know of as local authority inspectors that are notable for their incredibly reprehensible lack of discipline. Third, you are not the social equals of the First Lady of Kenya in any way, shape or form. She is, whether she wanted it or not, the Mother of the Nation. More importantly, she acts like it. She doesn't swan around the nation "demanding" things; we the people, through our sometimes intelligent elected representatives in Nairobi, consciously chose to give her a budget and a staff because she, too, is an ambassador of the nation. You, on the other hand, remind us of the jumped up wives of councillors, and by demanding the same perquisites as the First Lady of Kenya, you behave exactly like them.

Allow me to excoriate the tedious behaviour of all elected representatives when it comes to dipping their long, grimy fingers in the national cookie jar. The avaricious culture associated with members of our august parliament is yet to be reversed. There isn't a parliamentary session that does not include ever greater monetary demands from elected representatives. They receive "grants" that they never pay back. They get mortgages at rates that ordinary middle class Kenyans can only dream of. They get "allowances" that belie the functions they perform. They live it up like princes and princesses in children fairy tales, while we, the people, live like serfs did in feudal Europe. The immorality of their greed no longer troubles their consciences.

I believe that what unites the MCAs, their wives, governors' wives and MPs is the tacit agreement that the Government of Kenya is not an institution in service to the people, but a piggy bank for the privileged ones in elective positions to dip into whenever it strikes their fancy. They will pretend to perform their functions of representation, law-making and oversight of executive branches, but in reality they will be marking time, one year to the next, awaiting their favourite Bill: the Finance Bill. In this Bill lies their true interest. It is the one law that they will devote a significant amount of attention to. But lest you think that their attention is for the good of the people or of the nation, perish that thought.

The attentions of these men and women will be narrowly focussed on whether foreign junkets have been budgeted for or not, whether or not their "entertainment allowances" have been raised or not. The sizes of their wallets are all that consume them while they pretend to play at politics or at overseeing governors and Cabinet Ministers. They are leeches; they latched on to a healthy institution and they are determined to bleed it dry.