In spite of being youthful Parliament is a big let-down

That the sons and daughters of my age-mates are the same age as Kenya’s average parliamentarians should be an extraordinarily good thing.

According to one of our ethical postulates, it should have intruded a whole stream of new moral and intellectual blood into our legislative forums.

That was why, just before he retired, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Tanzania’s inimitable Mwalimu, urged us, Africans in all walks of life — especially in politics — to continually ng’atuka. The verb ng’atuka belongs to the late Teacher’s own Zanaki, a tiny Bantu community just south-east of the great lake that Tanzania shares with Kenya and Uganda.

Yet in Uganda and Tanzania — as much as in Kenya (and probably in Rwanda and Burundi) — intellectual Lilliputianism and moral putrefaction have been the lot of our children, including the most educated ones, ever since Mwalimu Nyerere made his historic appeal to us to continually stand down for the younger generation.

Five years ago, even Kenya — which the Tanzanian media once described as developing apace towards a “man-eat-man society” — appeared to recognise the importance of increasingly investing in youth in all areas of production and governance. We legally barred people above a certain age from seeking seats in Parliament.

The Kenyan voter was assured that the more “youthful” Parliament was, the more vigorously it would perform in the business of making good laws and ensuring their implementation to put paid to the executive’s apparently unquenchable itch to intrude long and hideous fingers into the public’s treasury.

In this way, Kenya’s intellectual elite showed that it had learned exactly nothing from the experience of post-Nyerere Tanzania, where rapacity and graft have increasingly choked the pores of society till it can no longer breathe.

And, in Kenya — as in Tanzania — we learn that Parliament has become the personification of this venal filth.

RIPPED OFF

In Kenya, we learn that Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) — the very body entrusted with the task of protecting the nation’s meagre property — may be involved up to the neck in channelling huge amounts of an internationally beggarly under-developed nation’s cash into the persona bank accounts of individual members.

What if we move to the bigger picture from what — in newspaper parlance — are but “insets”? That the ilk of Kenya have been and continue to be ripped off by crooks based in the Gnomes of Zurich (the Western capitals) is known to every child who can read the daily headlines on such themes as Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing.

Any genuine inquiry might reveal that tens of other transnational Western octopuses are involved with Kenya’s other nabobs to siphon off Kenya’s wealth to the North Atlantic in this manner. To be a truly effective legislative organ, the PAC would make some effort to publicise its activities and its findings.

In a word, if the PAC took its job seriously, Kenyans would now know a great deal more about these hideous international linkages. That is the context in which Wanjiku — our constitution-makers’ name for every voting Tom, Dick and Harriet — might pose questions about what is happening in the investigative organ of Kenya’s legislative instrument.

What Wanjiku might demand to know is whether — and, if so, to what extent — our PAC is involved in illegal and personally enriching deals with the jackdaws, vultures, seagulls and other members of Gnomes of Zurich. Posing as “aid-givers” and do-gooders, these roam the Third World like the Thebans of Pelasgic legend who roamed Colchis in search of the “Golden Fleece”.

It was their “democracy” and “freedom” that their own crooner Donovan — referring to the crudities and barbarisms of America’s soldiers at My Lai in Vietnam – was rejecting when he sang: “Seagull, I don’t want your wing, I don’t want your freedom in a lie …”

That is the question. If Parliament is serious about helping Kenya to extirpate corruption, why hasn’t it brought its PAC to account?

[email protected]