A man can dream

Last decade, just after I came home from university, I worked for an investigative agency. We weren't the police and we had no police powers. But we played our part to make things easier for those who came to us for help. There were many illuminating experiences in my time with the agency but none as revealing as the lengths to which the men and women we call "leaders" would go to evade the consequences of their unlawful acts, even if the consequences were, to our untrained eyes, minor and trifling.

I have heard told on social media that Kenya's parliamentarians have eschewed the call to put twenty per cent of their salaries in the Covid-19 response kitty because, if the Leader of the Majority Party in the Senate is to be believed, many parliamentarians take home a pittance after all the deductions made to their pay cheques have been made in account of massive loans and other commitments. He claimed that he took home less than ten thousand shillings. Rather than another deduction from his parliamentary salary he would make his contributions from his farm income. That he couldn't see the irony of claiming penury when he had more than one source of income escaped him completely.

When these men and women add the honorific "mheshimiwa" to their names, it is almost always certain that their lives and the lives they led before that august day will be as night and day. Their new lives and your ordinary lives will be as oil and water. Within a few months of election, they have access to privileges and benefits that the ordinary Kenyan can only dream of. But the greatest privilege of all is the ability, bar the rare occasion when all fails, to escape the consequences of unlawful acts. Their State offices act as a shield against most, if not all, inquiries. What amazes most people who pay keen attention to the parliamentarian's metamorphosis is the abrupt and total disconnect between the parliamentarian and the people he or she leads.

It is why, when Kenyans are facing the gathering storm of post-Covid-19 damage, a parliamentarian with more than one source of income will blithely declare, shamelessly and unafraid, that he cannot afford to pay anything into a fund established to cushion the very people he leads. It is why he is not ashamed to claim penury. It is why he will engage in a war of words with senior colleagues of his over matters that have nothing to do with offering succour and assistance to the suffering people he leads. None of his pronouncements - indeed, none of his colleagues' pronouncements - are designed to ameliorate the suffering of the people. They are, however, meant to signal that they are very much still interested in getting reelected. And hitching their wagons to this, that or the other principal.

If for nothing else, we can thank the pandemic for revealing that 99% of what the parliamentarian does in public, we can do without. And that the many millions we shall pay them over a term in Parliament can be pared down substantially without jeopardising service because they don't actually serve us but rather their own base desires. Covid-19 continues to reveal us to ourselves. Whether we learn any lessons from these revelations remains unknown and unknowable - though, a man could dream.