Courtesy of GADO (Facebook page)
I hardly know French. Apart from Bonjour and Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, that’s the only other French I know. But I like the said statement, mostly because it makes a mockery of hopeless hope. We believe in change and “Yes We Can’s”until the peddlers turn around with a smirk and tell us how silly we were to fall for their one and only trick yet again.
I hadn’t had the chance to follow on the recent national developments over the course of the week. But I had seen people make a lot of noise about our parliamentarians on social media. Words like selfish, self-serving, monkeys-in-disguise, dropouts were being thrown around. I thought to myself, “Did Kenyans just this week have an epiphany? Our MP’s have always been that way.”
So I decided to wait for the weekend, when I’d find time to catch up with all the parliamentarian’s newest sins. Saturday came, I copped as many dailies as I could and I started digging. I learned that the entire outcry was about the lawmakers chopping and changing our year-old constitution. Through a series of amendments, the ‘honorable members’- in one sitting- saw it best to unilaterally piss on the 70% ‘YES’ referendum votes by Kenyans.
They proposed to allow a Presidential candidate vie for other positions and they also proposed that sitting MP’s be cushioned from the budget proposal that every Kenyan pay their taxes. In all his wisdom, the Speaker threw out the obnoxious suggestions. But the scheming was just beginning. What followed was a legion of crazy proposals that would make this man happy.
They altered the Political Parties Act to allow party hopping up to two months before the General Election from the original five. They also changed the Elections Act to provide that parties can present their presidential candidates can be up for nomination to the 12 special seats in the National Assembly- never minding the fact that these were reserved for the disabled, youth and the marginalized. They also meddled with the Vetting of Judges and Magistrates Act and the Sexual Offences Act.
However, the most highlighted amendment and that which caused Kenyans to turn red in their Facebooks had to do with education qualifications. The legislators crafted a clever way to go around the possession of a university degree requirement for anyone to vie for an elective post. So, they exempted themselves from that requirement. See I had never realized that while the likes of James Orengo and Martha Karua referred to each other as ‘learned friends’, there was a bunch of others who would feel discriminated due to their unlearned nature. This is when it hit me that our Legislature is littered with dropouts.
That amendment proved to be the final straw. A day of national outrage followed. This is where my theory comes in. Picture a Kamukunji of the smarter MP’s:
“Ok learned friends, the nation is turning against us. What to do? Hmmmm…”
“We shall not suffer the scorn of Kenyans because of those few fools among us.”
“Let us confuse them with complex amendments that will puzzle their little minds.”
So Amos Kimunya walks into Parliament the next day with a new proposal. He says that it will be mandatory for MP’s to hold university certification in 2017. The rest of the House take this to mean that they have been given leeway to contest the 2012/2013 elections. They unanimously pass the proposal and consequently proceed to exchange high fives and chuckles. Charles Kilonzo (after getting a clever wink from a fellow smarty- again, completely my theory) then gets up and cuts short the cheers. He suggests that the Legislature goes back to the original amendment by the ‘unlearned friends’ and do away with it. So the rest of the House sees no harm in that and again they unanimously pass the proposal. Cheers, roars and handshakes of mistaken victory continue to ring in the Chamber’s air. This happens until they are notified that they have bizarrely dropped the axe on themselves.
Now, as Kenyans petition the President not to assent to the amendments, the disgruntled ‘unlearned friends’ are also writing to him begging him not to seal their political demise saying they did not understand what they were doing! So the President is now stuck with amendments that neither Kenyans nor the Legislators that passed them want signed into law.
But then, why are Legislatures amending a constitution that a majority of them and Kenyans supported and overwhelmingly passed as a break from the eerie past? Why is there more amending than there is implementation? The answer is, any promise of change coming from a politicians tongue is just a false dawn. For them, and also us who tolerate them, THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME.
All Out... 