Photo: Capital FM News

Parliament: Earlier attempts to temporarily halt the move to increase MPs' severance pay flopped after a judge chose not to issue temporary orders to stop the parliamentarians' pay, saying there is no irreparable loss at this stage.

MPs are proposing that they each receive Sh15 million instead of the previous Sh3m as gratuity pay.

This simply means that the ever suffering taxpayers will fork out Sh3.3 bn to sever ties between the electorate and their MPs- five times more than the Sh666m that they would have been paid. This amount is over and above all the other dues that MPs have awarded themselves over the years.

We say this enhanced severance pay is unjustified. It is adding insult to injury to the already overburdened Kenya electorate who are really the MPs' employers. They have received little or no service in exchange for the huge salaries and other perks that the MPs have allocated themselves.

An appraisal of their performance clearly indicates that the MPs have failed in most of their tasks. They have dragged their feet when it came to enacting laws and introduced partisan political interests to interfere in their oversight role. They have reduced the august House to a spectacle where personal interests and vendettas are played out in public.

An employee who fails to deliver can expect to be summarily dismissed without any dues. So why should MPs expect Kenyans to 'reward' them with such a hefty payoff?

Quote of the day: "There are no desperate situations, there are only desperate people," Heinz Guderian, a German WWII general and tank commander, theorist of tank combat and one of the founders of blitzkrieg strategy. He died on May 14,1954.