Injustice occurs each time commissions get paid to sit

By PETER WANYONYI

Our judiciary, it seems, is one long, fat, overfed group of worthies all gorging themselves on an unending gravy train.

It’s like the glutton Mfalme Jeta of Tanzanian literary icon Shaban Robert’s epoch-defining little book, Kusadikika. Only that this is many times worse. Kenyans are used to lambasting our MPs, but it appears our “honourable” justices and their fellow public servants in the dispensation of justice are the worst of the lot.

Imaginary flights

For one, there is the system of “sitting allowances”. This is a curious concept that has been abused to perfection by Kenya’s ruling classes.

The idea is that when these worthies get together to “sit” and deliberate any matter, they forgo opportunities to make money elsewhere. As a result, the taxpayer has to compensate them for these lost opportunities.

This is fair enough, but the amounts are anything but fair: members of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) apparently earn Sh80,000 per day as sitting allowance!  It doesn’t take a greedy Kenyan to work out why the JSC rejected a proposal to cap the number of such meetings to a maximum of five every month.

How, when some of those commissioners on the JSC are making, on average, an astonishing Sh700,000 a month over a two-year period, just for showing up at meetings, plunking learned bottoms onto a bench, and leaving after ten minutes. Great work, if you can get it.

It is also little more than theft. If rumours are to be believed, some JSC members are making claims for imaginary flights and hotel accommodation, with some being forced to withdraw such claims. Matters are so bad, it is said, that none other than the Chief Justice himself — who we must note is among the lowest claimants on the JSC — decried the “excessive expenditure” of the JSC.

But then again, this is the lot of the Kenyan. We have the best-paid MPs in the whole world, bar none.

We have the most rapacious judiciary commission and some of the best-paid judges, but no word on magistrates. What we hear is that they suffer without bitterness in far-flung postings on meager salaries.

Our cabinet secretaries are plucked from astonishing obscurity, and usually know nothing about the subject matter handled by the ministries they run. In Kenya, it is possible for a handcart-pusher with no formal schooling and zero qualifications to be appointed minister in charge of nuclear energy. We believe in the ability of the human spirit to conquer mountains, you see.

Pink drinks

But as the ruling class roil in their air-conditioned, taxpayer-funded limousines, quaffing expensive pink drinks and signing up — at your expense of course — to fantastic golf clubs and private jets costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of shillings a year, what happens to us, the kawaida people?

We take up tribal arms and defend them like our lives depend on it.

Every so often, they lean out of their chauffeur-driven limos to toss out a tribal epithet or two, and guess what we do? We go crazy with primitive energy.