Ours is a ruling class that exists to fleece its underclass to the bone

President Uhuru Kenyatta arrives at Narok Stadium in Narok County for the 56th Madaraka Day celebrations on June 1, 2019. The President himself has a penchant for creating willy-nilly unnecessary jobs for leeches, like the one of Cabinet Administrative Secretary (CAS). PHOTO | PSCU

What you need to know:

  • There has been an outcry on online blogs directed at the President over this sorry state of affairs, and how it has impoverished Wanjiku.

  • It is more than just a litany of insults. It is a cry for help. Mr President, listen keenly to this cry. Understand it.

  • The rest of the incendiary blather about Mr So-and-so usurping your political base is what, in your mother tongue, is called mwaki wa mabebe. I am sure Mr President you get it.

Jeshi ti ngenu (the foot soldiers are not happy). That’s the message from President Uhuru Kenyatta’s disgruntled voters whose overriding complaint is that the economy is not working for them. It is working for the top cream: The politicians, the high government people, the parasites at the apex of officialdom. The ones who roam around in V8s and with bodyguards and chase cars and who love being called leaders.

TOP PARASITES

Data shows the biggest chunk of State revenues go to service the payrolls of government employees who consist of a mere 1.5 per cent of Kenya’s population. This by any measure is outrageous. Even within this 1.5 per cent, the disparities are obscene. The top parasites – ministers, MPs, judges, constitutional commissioners – draw in one-million-a-month salaries (minus allowances) whereas the mass of government workers subsist on Sh30,000-a-month pay.

The real producer of the country’s wealth is the small-scale farmer – of tea, coffee, sugar, dairy, maize et cetera. They are, without exception, leading miserable lives. The sugar cane farmer has seen sugar factories go under and his backlog of dues remain unpaid. A clip recently went viral showing a desolate Nyeri peasant farmer uprooting his tea bushes because they no longer give value. He cited depressingly low returns and poor bonus payments. He’d rather plant napier grass for his cows, he said. He had a hell of a lot more to say: What are the beautiful Chinese roads for if not to serve those million-shilling-salary scroungers with their V8s and chase cars? Yet it’s the small farmer who is heavily taxed to pay back those loans? Get back money into our pockets, they scream, and we won’t need those housing schemes the government is throwing at us. We will comfortably build our own two-bedroom shacks with our own earned money.

Mr Parasite, take note. Take note carefully. You are living large at some poor guy’s expense. Don’t you ever imagine he is ignorant of the fact. He resents your lifestyle, which he knows is financed by him against his will. This can’t continue indefinitely. Parliament has become so insensitive it recently awarded itself a Sh250,000-a-month-per-MP house allowance, backdated to last year. That amount for a single MP is enough to pay the combined annual tea bonuses of several peasant households. Half of their time, these MPs – and the other members of the official parasite class – are attending useless conferences overseas, sponging on extravagant per diems paid for by the poor taxpayer.

RUINOUSLY TAXED

The President himself has this penchant for creating willy-nilly unnecessary jobs for these leeches, like the one of Cabinet Administrative Secretary (CAS). The small farmer just wants to get what is rightfully theirs – the fruits of their toil, which they see being ruinously taxed to sustain those parasitic lifestyles and to repay the loans for those Chinese roads. And dams which never get built while the loans given out for them disappear into some corrupt people’s pockets.

It is an existential problem, Mr Government Parasite. The political class is woefully missing the picture. Totally. They are just obsessed with 2022 succession games. Talking of which, the hoi polloi want these freeloader slots drastically reduced. They can’t understand why they need so many MCAs, members of the National Assembly, senators and what have you. They don’t care how this downsizing will happen, as long as it is done. Rest assured that any constitution review proposal that is structured on cutting down this bloated roll of bloodsuckers will win massive support from the peasant farmer and the urban poor. Across the board.

Another breed of leech called the activist (this one milks donors) is just as out of touch. When she appears on TV – her preferred medium of chatter – to blabber how the constitution is a beautiful document which guarantees heaven and equity and rights, she is merely rationalising the fact that the document is a catalogue of expensive entitlements for the parasite class. She makes absolutely no sense to the poor, who can see through her silly, hypocritical self. They know from bitter experience that this constitution is not working for them. It was created for the parasites.

FIRE NEXT TIME

There has been an outcry on online blogs directed at the President over this sorry state of affairs, and how it has impoverished Wanjiku. It is more than just a litany of insults. It is a cry for help. Mr President, listen keenly to this cry. Understand it. The rest of the incendiary blather about Mr So-and-so usurping your political base is what, in your mother tongue, is called mwaki wa mabebe. I am sure Mr President you get it.

As for Mr Parasite, I know you don’t read. But please do, for once. Buy a book titled The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. Read it. Internalise its theme of denial in the face of reality. Simply substitute the mental template of race relations to that of social and class relations. And put yourself in the shoes of the victim class.