A few wealthy people are lording it on the majority

About 90 per cent of public expenditure on salaries and allied benefits is paid to just about 500 people. Among these are 222 Members of Parliament and just fewer than 300 other assorted fat cats.

Mr Aaron Ringera of the Kenya Anti-Corruption commission, for example, is paid Sh2.5 million a month, basically for doing next to nothing. The edifice he presides over is at best a dynastic witch-hunting outfit. But more realistically, it is a veritable white elephant that should never have been.

In this ornate white elephant edifice are another five gentlemen who "work" with Ringera. They are paid Sh1.5 million each a month for oscillating between petty political witch hunting and doing nothing. The hunters of fortune at Kacc cost Kenyans a minimum of Sh10 million a month.

In another part of Kenya, the lowest paid public university lecturer has a consolidated salary of about Sh80,000 a month. This is basically to say that the top six people in Ringera’s office earn the salary of a crying 125 lecturers, yes, 100 and 25. But that is not all.

It is common knowledge that our indolent and absentee MPs are the most pampered fellows on a public payroll anywhere in the world. It is perhaps not worth mentioning that this frivolous and gay-loving lot fixes its own pay package. To attempt to unbundle the package here will be to overwhelm my reader with a sense of nausea.

It is behind this background that the ongoing university lecturers’ strike, as well as other clamour for better terms in the public sector, ought to be looked at.

The question must be asked, What kind of society have we created? Do we seem to have created a plutocratic state in which 500 people are holding 30 million others hostage? Is the whole nation at the mercy of 222 MPs and a couple of dozen senior public officers?

At any rate, the parallels between the society today and pre-revolutionary Europe must continue disturbing those who have read history.

Just like France before the 1789 – 1792 Revolution, Parliament has become the enemy of the people, where it should be the people’s watchdog. Ours is easily the only National Assembly in the world that can give Government a blank cheque to spend billions even without interrogating the intended expenditure, as they did this week.

While the rest of the nation is evolving into a landscape of stormy discontent, people’s elected representatives have become self-pampering mascots with a keen addiction to pleasure-seeking.

When Parliament gives Government blank cheques amid brewing labour storms, then such a Parliament can no longer be counted upon to ventilate public grief.

The Cabinet, on its part, behaves like proud and exclusive nobility. It should surprise nobody that a Minister who had nothing three years ago now boasts of a fleet of 70 (yes, 70) sleek limousines and assorted real property in all the prime places you can think of in the country.

The bigger tragedy is that university lecturers seek not to redeem the nation from the decay, but to join the exclusive club of the eating chiefs. We are a people whose leadership has lost interest in the welfare of the people as well as the people’s respect, and they really do not give a damn.

Where our intellectuals should be trying to redeem Kenyans from the den of lions, they are instead jostling for space on the lions’ dining table.

Who can speak for ordinary Kenyans when Parliament, the Judiciary, the top notch of the Executive and our literati all think only of their wallets?

Who will speak for Kenyans when the grotesquely paid are also the ones with the opportunity to steal in Anglo Leasing and Goldenberg style?

Worse still, these less than 500 people are immune to the law. They can play about with Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing and ring circles around you for 16 years and beyond.

But if you thought that was the entire expanse of the tragedy, you are mistaken. For, we ordinary Kenyans are a big part of the problem.

We cannot believe it when our prophets tell us that the daily war of words between Narc-Kenya and ODM-Kenya is an exclusive members ’club dispute. ODM-Kenya and Narc-Kenya are identical twin brothers.

They are fighting over who has the right to loot Kenya and who hasn’t. They are bogus and fraudulent political outfits, whose members do not want to hear about their history.

They do not even pretend to speak for Kenya. The name of their game is power and personal wealth.

Kenya needs a new deal. Kenya needs fresh gallant men and women who can speak for her. We have no place for avaricious parliamentarians who cannot recognise a national powder keg, even when they sit on one. Nor do we have a place for university dons who crave to eat from the table of privilege amid debilitating poverty.

Kenyans should not be deceived. We are firmly in the grip of the eating chiefs.

The barking chiefs in Narc-Kenya and ODM-Kenya are eating you, alive.

They are able to gravitate across the country making all manner of political noise because you have placed food on their table; you have given them a home and security. You are educating their children in exclusive schools, and God knows what else you haven’t done for them!

University lecturers, a selfish and privileged lot in their own right, now want better sitting and eating space on the table of privilege, when they should be carrying the rest of the nation with them in the search for better things. Nobody cares about you. That is unless you can stand up for your rights and ask for a new deal from your leaders today, now.