What we have for Parliaments are veritable beer halls

The National Assembly in session. FILE PHOTO |

What you need to know:

  • Lately, both houses of Parliament have become veritable beer halls.
  • The kind of words they hurl at one another just cannot conduce to any civil debate.
  • Ladies and gentlemen of the Chamber, your people sent you to the centre of governance to make policies.
  • It should worry all Kenyans into pushing Mr Speaker to create a punitive method of returning our House to the days of James Gichuru, Tom Mboya, Masinde Muliro, Ronald Ngala, Jaramogi Odinga, Jean-Marie Seroney and Martin Shikuku.

Does your MP really represent you in the August House?

Would a Martian visitor report back home that the MP behaves in a manner that echoes the Kenya of your dream?

Do sparks of brotherhood, sorority, hard work, honesty, humility, good manners, knowledge and skill shine from your MP’s mouth and work?

I ask because Parliament is the institution constitutionally appointed to represent your objective needs and the manner in which Kenya can achieve its national goals.

Yet, from what House Speaker Justin Muturi said of his own wards the other day, we cannot even call that gathering an August house.

Lately, both houses of Parliament have become veritable beer halls.

The kind of words they hurl at one another just cannot conduce to any civil debate.

Not infrequently, those words are unprintable because – as Luo members know – you just cannot utter them in front of your mother-in-law.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Chamber, your people sent you to the centre of governance to make policies and – by means of exemplary behaviour – to lead the people of Kenya on how to tighten their national oneness in the production and reproduction of their wherewithal in ever intensifying fraternity and sorority.

They did not send you there to pull one another’s shirt collars; to exchange brawny fisticuffs; to expectorate matusi onto one another.

They sent you there to serve them through social knowledge and demonstrative discourse, to show them the way towards a unity of purpose in the production of ever more and ever better goods and services.

Anybody who enters Parliament with the purpose merely of bearing false witness and exchanging insults – all the time on the basis of tribe (all our parties being  but ethnic vehicles through which a class of human beings seeks personal political economic fortunes) – is leading his people up the garden path.

Relative to so many other countries, our country is so backward in terms of knowledge and skills that it is simply heart-rending to see its leaders pouring tons and tons of political energy down the drain, engaged every day that passes in nothing more than tribal actions, leading to nothing more unifying nationally than tribal accusations and counter-accusations.

To be sure, the freedom with which positive social and scientific ideas are competing with one another is the measure number one of democracy.

But ideas have never fallen into anybody’s lap from the blue sky.

All ideas – especially those that catalyse development – must be produced through hard work nationwide upon a country’s natural endowments.

To achieve this – to ensure that all the people are engaged only in creative thought and productive work; to ensure that none wastes any national time on idle talk and crime; to ensure the people think only such thoughts and do only such things as can conduce to unity, productivity and existential satisfaction – that, I think, is the first task of the political class.

Even  what William Shakespeare  called “rump-fed ronyons” – those who grow fat by stealing whole chunks from the public granary – should know that, where you do not raise your productivity, there, very soon, everything will have been stolen and nothing will remain to steal. Even they are digging their own graves.

But – to use a cliché of the media and the NGOs – Parliament is the institution “tasked” to lead Kenyans in the struggle to achieve their national goals through the shortest route by debating all relevant ideas with solid evidence, personal decorum, civil gentleness, demonstrative intelligence and equanimity.

The growing absence of all these factors from our debates is what seems to worry Mr Muturi.

It should worry all Kenyans into pushing Mr Speaker to create a punitive method of returning our House to the days of James Gichuru, Tom Mboya, Masinde Muliro, Ronald Ngala, Jaramogi Odinga, Jean-Marie Seroney and Martin Shikuku.