Just this morning I was engaged in a debate with one of my friends a Mr. Boroon Siroon. Our debate was centered on the proposed MPs' pay rise that has elicited a lot of outrage from all sections of the Kenyan public.
Though at the beginning of the debate we seemed to read from different scripts, with my friend somehow seeing the whole uproar over the intended MPs' hefty pay rise as a scenario of majoring in the minor while I was of the opinion that the uproar is valid, we came to conclude our debate while reading from the same script.
During our debate I asked myself one question that, is denying the MPs' the payrise that they so yearn for enough? Definately it is not.
As my friend rightly put it during our debate, the bone of contention is not really whether or not the MPs are paid a lot of money or not but whether quality services in terms of health care, quality education, improved infrastructure and so on and so forth accrue to the common mwananchi when MPs are denied a pay rise.
He went on further to state that even if the President refuses to sign the bills authorising the payhike for the MPs, there may be no improvement on the services delivered to the common mwananchi because almost all our institutions are not mwananchi friendly but instead are public officers pocket friendly (read corruption).
Take for example, collection of garbage in the city's suburbs. You may have noticed that whether or not MPs increase their salaries like they have always done in the past, garbage will still be a menace in the suburbs because some institution somewhere is not doing its work of delivering services - in this case garbage collection and disposal - to mwananchi who obediently pay tax and live in those suburbs.
I am not trying to legitimise the MPs demand for a hefty pay rise as being valid, in fact am on record before as having categorically objected to their weird demand but all am trying to say is that we need to give this issue a multifaceted approach for the common good to prevail.
Whereas we are rejecting non-deserved hefty pay rise for the MPs we need to audit our public institutions and rid them of corruption that for years on end has denied the common mwananchi the well deserved quality services like healthcare and clean and healthy living environment which by the way should be a basic human right; though the proposed new constitution already recognises clean and healthy living environment as a basic human right.
It surely does no good to deny the MPs the payrise in the pretex that it will eat into the public coffers, while in reality very little trickles down to the common mwananchi - even at the moment - from the public coffers in form of public services which are also usually not up to standard.
It is wrong to award MPs such hefty pay rise but it is also not right to argue that whether we increase their salaries or not the common mwanachi may not feel any change anyway. Two wrongs will surely never make a right and so a wrong should never be used to legitimise another wrong.
I believe it is past time - just like my friend put - that we addressed the real bone of contention and avoided the sideshows that we are fond of majoring on, for the benefit of the common mwananchi living somewhere deep in the country side.
Let us rid our institutions of corruption and save this country from going to the dogs. It all starts with you. Be the change you want to see in the society.
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