Law-maker, what dost thou do?

I am a lazy man, but I am not Bill Gates's ideal lazy man because if given a task I don't like, I will not find the most efficient short-cut to get it done. I will simply not do it at all. Or that at least is what I think I am. I may be wrong. But in my line of work, I do come across the truly lazy; those who will not do their jobs simply because they think that someone else should do it for them. I don't really know what they do with their time.

The latest proof of this laziness is this rather startling declaration by a senator: "It would be prudent to withdrawal the Bills and only return them to Parliament when they have been harmonised with the views of all those affected." She is writing in the context of proposed legislation over community land. I will refrain from attacking her remarkable grammar; I will instead focus on her demand that Bills be withdrawn from Parliament until those Bills are harmonised with the views of affected Kenyans, mainly Kenyans who have a legitimate claim to community land.

Parliamentarians, who include senators, have three broad jobs: representation of their constituents, whatever that means; oversight over the government, another catchall phrase; and law-making. Law-making, good people, is not the job of judges, though they sometimes do that, or the president and his cabinet, though they frequently do that. Law-making is the job of parliamentarians and if this senator does not understand this, almost three years since she was nominated to sit in the senate, you have to wonder how many members of her august chamber live under this delusion too.

The Executive and the Judiciary, as well as constitutional commissions, independent offices, state corporations and parastatals, can recommend the making of particular laws and with the advice of the Attorney-General, have done so on very numerous occasions. But that is not the making of law; it is the making of a proposal which Parliament can accept or reject. The decision to accept or reject is not in the hands of the Speakers of  the Houses of Parliament but in that of the members of both chambers. It is called parliamentary debate.

I am sure you too have waited patiently for this senator to take an active role in parliamentary debate and this far into her parliamentary term you must be wondering what assets landed her a senate nomination. For the life of me I cannot recall a single senate debate in which she has made an informed, impassioned contribution especially on this, she claims, her pet subject of community land. It must be that the-people-owe-me attitude she and her colleagues labour delusionally under where they get to trouser millions every year in salaries an remunerations while the little people do the heavy lifting. She is, ironically, an apposite example of why the Senate of Kenya is of absolutely no use to the people of Kenya.

Law-making is not easy, and the instinct to pass the buck to the Attorney-General, the Kenya Law Reform Commission, the National Land Commissions or the CIC is strong. But the constitutional arrangement will not change overnight: it is Parliament that makes law. This senator should get off her high horse and do what she was nominated to do and for which she receives the equivalent of a queen's ransom. Kenya's political parties did not nominate Barbie dolls. It's time nominated parliamentarians stopped acting like Barbie dolls.