A special place in hell.

There's a special place in hell for those who think that The Law is the be all and end all, and that if only their pet project was legislated into life, all would be right with the world. I say this knowing full well that I have contributed massively to the over-legislating taking place in my backyard. Every minister and his PS is busily turning every last shred of their humanity into an Act of Parliament. It will not end well.

Mostly because Parliament is not the best place to make laws. Trust me. It might seem like the "representatives of the people" should know what is best for the people and make it so through law-making. It would, I grant you. That view is utter nonsense. The best place to make law, bar one or two autocratic instincts, is the executive branch, especially when that law is being made by the bureaucrats who just want to coast to retirement and a fat pension. Minister and PSs are not the bureaucrats I have in mind; those would be directors of this, that or the other.

Take the Director of Medical Services. He is the embodiment of public health. By he time he has ju-jitsu-ed himself into office, he has seen the best and the worst when it comes to public health crises. Cholera, measles, whooping cough, polio, malaria, marasmus, HIV/AIDS...he has seen it all. He knows what works and what does not. He would love a bigger budget, but he knows that when it comes to intervening to halt a pandemic, what he wants is absolute power to command the institutions of the State to do his bidding.

His minister and PS, however, live in a world where money is the only thing they can see and the things it can buy. They love thirty eight billion shilling boondoggles. They like them even more when they can hide their uselessness behind the President; let him take the flak because, after all, he wants to spend money on healthcare.

If there is a person to listen to when drafting the perfect Health Bill, it is the Director of Medical Services. Not the chairman of the parliamentary departmental committee on health. He may have a casual connection with the health industry; he almost certainly knows nothing about public health policy. He too, like the minister and the PS, lies for billion shilling boondoggles so long as he can dictate where part of those billions will be spent: preferably in his constituency, preferably without too great an auditing eye.

Which is why the people who declaim loudest about The Law know absolutely nothing of how it works, what it is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it or to whom. A Health Bill is not just an administrative organogram with a list of offences and penalties tacked on for good measure. It is a statement by the State about powers that will be exercised by civil servants to protect the people from cholera, measles, whooping cough, polio, malaria, marasmus, HIV/AIDS and whatever other health risks are out there. But you wouldn't know it listening to the "stakeholders" of whom, too, special reservations have been made in hell.