Mutuma Mathiu is right

Wealth is born of restlessness, an inability to sleep up to 10am, a willingness to obsessively hustle, a preparedness to deny oneself, a tendency to pinch pennies until they sing, a capacity for hard work, and a good measure of risk-taking and luck.

If you do not have most of these qualities, having money is just an exercise in postponing your destined, inescapable state — penury. —Mutuma Mathiu

In 2013, Parliament considered the Parliamentary Society of Kenya Bill, 2013. It's object was, "The object and purpose of this Act is to provide a legal framework for the participation of former members in the promotion of the ideals of parliamentary democracy,promote networking amongst former members and facilitate their reintegration into professional life." It proposed to establish a Parliamentary Society of Kenya," and among its functions was, "facilitate the maintenance and promotion of the status and well being of former members of Parliament."

It's memorandum of objects and reasons states, in extenso—

Most members of parliament abandon their careers and spend most of their time in public service. It becomes quite difficult for such members to feel part and parcel of the ordinary civilian populations and their employment prospects are greatly reduced. It also becomes psychologically difficult for such members to adjust to life outside parliament and this affects such members psychologically. As a result there are stories of ex-members including their partners suffering nervous breakdown, divorce, heart attacks, alcoholism, school debts and even bankruptcy.

This Bill therefore seeks to come to the rescue of former members, some of whom have offered selfless service to the country. The Bill is aimed at ensuring that former members receive the necessary counseling which is important in ensuring that they are able to get back to ordinary life. The Bill also aims at ensuring that employment prospects of such members are not too badly diminished and in this respect the Act aims at offering consultancy service to members so as to ensure that they get into gainful employment.

The Bill establishes the Parliamentary Society of Kenya whose functions among others is to facilitate professional counseling services, provide advise on retirement, advise on re-employment or re-training and financial planning to former members of Parliament. Further the Board is empowered to provide outreach programmes where former members of Parliament can visit and speak at universities, academies, schools and voluntary groups to give their experiences, particular skills and a clear idea as to how Parliament works.

Mr Mathiu was addressing the youth who are mesmerised by the meteoric rise of public figures such as Babu Owino and Steve Mbogo, and the perceived fame and wealth of Vera Sidika and Huddah Monroe, who seem to live lives of luxury. However, Mr Owino, Mr Mbogo, Ms Sidika and Ms Monroe are no different from the parliamentarian who drafted the Parliamentary Society of Kenya Bill, 2013.

Parliamentarians are paid an exorbitant salary. Before the promulgation of Kenya's second Constitution in 2010, Parliamentarians were at the heart of financial scams that impoverished the nation and imperilled the public finances of Kenya. In the KANU era, parliamentarians were demigods, making decisions that had far-reaching ramifications on the lives of ordinary Kenyans. They made a good fist of isolating themselves from the people they purported to represent, a situation that persists today, and no one can claim with a straight face that they lived lives of penury.

Parliamentarians pioneered the art of wealth sans hard work. Even a back-of-the-envelope assessment of the worth of all previous Parliaments since Independence will demonstrate that we barely broke even as a nation for the national treasure Kenya expended for the luxury of parliamentarians, Cabinets and the judiciary. To demand, as the Bill did, that we must expend more national treasure to rehabilitate the unrehabilitatable parliamentary class was an affront that shouldn't have surprised us. This mindset is responsible for the frequently unrequited dream of wealth without hard work harboured by a growing cohort of youth, star-struck by "celebrities" and "socialites" of dubious repute. And when the youth are emulating their parents, who have adopted the parliamentarians' mindset, we are truly at risk of losing this nation to scams that do nothing but create millionaires and billionaires while yoking our fortunes to the World Bank, the IMF and the Chinese.