Gitau Warigi
30 March 2003
opinion
Nairobi — It's rather too much considering their two-day work week. Our Members of Parliament have become a very defensive lot lately. It was possible at some point not to grumble too loudly when they awarded themselves a pay rise that could be argued to be belated. However, their penchant to continue doing so at the slightest opportunity is becoming increasingly annoying and difficult to defend. Especially not when the emoluments and the perks keep shooting to the moon.
This evident greed leaves a bad taste in the mouth, for two reasons. First is the crass insensitivity to the masses of low-paid cadres who are living from hand to mouth, not to mention that these hefty salary increases come at the wrong time; when the economy has hit rock bottom. There is an enormous sense of injustice when you pay yourself, in effect, a million shillings in two months, while teachers, nurses, policemen and air traffic controllers are left in the queue wondering when the meagre increments they had been promised will ever materialise.
I am not suggesting that MPs were better off being paid like morgue attendants, much as some people now think the work the latter do is of somewhat greater importance. The problem everybody has is with the timing. The salaries of most public servants have been stagnant for a long time. Indeed, you can speak of them having been in recession over the years when you take into account the unrelenting rise in the cost of living. It doesn't go down well when it turns out that it is only the big shots, like the MPs, judges and constitution review commissioners, who get raises the moment they whine.
The other problem is the gross craving for ostentation our MPs are displaying. Parliament's car park is resplendent with luxury Toyota Prados and Nissan Patrols that vie in size with military battle tanks. In the last few years, Parliament has sucked in rapid amounts of public largesse.
There was the purchase of Nairobi's Continental House and its subsequent outfitting, at great public expense, with posh offices and recreation rooms for the 220-odd MPs. Rather than spend some of the money on better library facilities or to employ research assistants to sharpen parliamentary work, the MPs were more excited about having fancy gyms and fitness centres in their new office complex.
I am told the offices and carpeting are pretty good, though my faith in the MPs' propensity to use their spanky new premises for decent purposes was diluted considerably when I heard the story of one of the honourable members who seized on the privacy his new office afforded to sexually proposition a female parliamentary staffer.
Whatever happened to the virtue of simplicity? Once upon a time, we all thought politics was a calling, like the priesthood. It is not an entirely edifying sight when politicians these days thrust with corporate executives for the same perks and pay packages, if not better ones. At any rate I know of no salaried company executive who earns his keep by keeping the indolent two-day work week our MPs enjoy.
The argument the MPs are using to deflect the criticism is that it was not they who recommended the latest car-purchase grants, which are going to cost the Exchequer Sh735 million. It was a review panel chaired by retired Chief Justice Majid Cockar. If that is the case, then the long-delayed teachers' increments have an even stronger pedigree. They happen to have been negotiated by a salary review committee that, unlike the Cockar panel, operates under an actual Act of Parliament. Is there any need to add that the outcome of such a review is legally binding?
I am perfectly aware that the budgetary implications of the MPs' car-scheme are nowhere near those of meeting the salary expectations of the 240,000 teachers. Still it is the tendency of our MPs to cash in on their position when every other average civil servant is feeling underpaid, or when people are daily getting retrenched.
The work of an MP is not quantifiable in the sense, say, of that of a teacher or a nurse or a policeman. There is that feeling that we are spending too much money and attention on a group whose job is basically to generate hot, unproductive noise.
A couple of weeks ago I had a rather curious encounter in a Nairobi restaurant with a group of Americans who were visiting the country.
One of them, who struck up a conversation with me, described herself as a "freelance travel writer," adding for effect that at one time she had worked with the New York Times newspaper. Oddly, though, she could not recall the name of the executive editor of the newspaper at the time she said she wrote for it, neither could she recollect who was the editor of the Sunday section where her pieces supposedly appeared. I also thought it odd that for a "travel writer" on assignment in Africa, she was obsessively interested in my views on the politics of the Iraq war.
The lady and her colleagues seemed to believe that American troops would be welcomed by Iraqis with flowers and celebrations. It was all my companion and I could do to keep from bursting out laughing.
The ongoing war has exposed this folly, which apparently is what the American Government believed in when they talked about a short, sharp war. It's got bogged down, with the Iraqi civilian population stoutly refusing to get "liberated." Even if they will, which they eventually must when the fire-power gets too much, they will be doing so out of self-preservation than anything else.
In short, what we are seeing is not a war of liberation. It is a war of old-fashioned conquest. Pray, if the Iraqi population is so conditioned by fear of Saddam Hussein's tyranny as not to recognise their moment of deliverance, why then are we seeing pictures such as in Deutsche Welle TV of Iraqis streaming from the safety of Jordan to go home and help fight the invaders? And why are the enormous refugee camps erected outside Iraq's borders empty despite the ceaseless aerial bombardment of Iraq?
And who hasn't noticed the obscene Anglo-American dash to "secure" Iraqi oilfields? It sends an obvious message of what this war is largely about.
E-mail: gwarigi@nation.co.ke
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