Three cheers for Akiwumi team, we feel proud

The Akiwumi tribunal has done us all proud. It’s sagacity and probing intellect is a great credit to this country.

Soon, we shall have a spanking new building for Parliament.

On top of the spacious modern offices and health club at Continental House, we shall also have a hospital to attend the ills, gout, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, alcoholism, haemorrhoids and the odd STD of MPs.

Best of all, we shall also have nursing cubicles so that the Aye! of lawmaking is tempered by the burp of the breast-fed baby.

And baby-sitting centres, too, so that a lawmaker’s offspring is never too far from mummy as she flits from Chamber to committee room, or dozes contentedly in the members’ canteen.

Why didn’t anyone think of these brilliant things earlier?

The cost of living has gone up, it has! How come you didn’t notice? In 2003, when MPs got their last pay hike, inflation was nothing.

Today it is 26 per cent. So members will have a 5 per cent annual pay increment built into their salaries so that parliamentary pockets are not raided by rising cost of living.

As for tax, which you have erroneously been accusing MPs of evading, things have changed.

Today, MPs earn a minimum Sh851,000, out of which Sh200,000 is their basic pay, on which they pay tax. Sh651,000 is untaxed, and by a law made by themselves, untaxable. The last Finance minister to try to tax it came to grief.

The matter has now been fully dealt with. MPs’ basic taxable pay has been increased to Sh350,000, one of their three car allowances (excluding the Sh3 million car grant) has been “spread”, their house allowance, entertainment allowance, sitting allowance and standing allowance appropriately increased and the matter rested.

Therefore, no more children will be eaten by hyenas in Turkana.

The displaced people living in mud holes (after being evicted from their homes and their families slaughtered by thugs incited, paid and led by some MPs), the 3.8 million weakened by drought and now flooded out of their homes, the millions of hopeless youth without jobs, the tens of thousands walking to work to earn starvation wages, the millions living in slums and crapping in the sitting room, the mothers dying in childbirth, the children dying of simple diseases, all this is finished.

The Akiwumi tribunal has treated our MPs honourably. What more could we possibly ask of life? We are lucky to be living in these great, honourable times.