Bunge Chronicles: Senators pricked by bid to curtail their travels abroad

Previous session in Parliament, Nairobi [David Njaaga, Standard]

Senators want to be ‘freer than birds’ to travel

Alas! Senators can fly again. They are as free as the Constitution allows them, as Kericho Senator Aaron Cheruiyot declared. They are freer than birds, and can travel abroad for official and personal duties.

That is courtesy of their commendable service to humanity by passing the Political Parties (Amendment) Bill. Word has it that Mr or Mrs Orders-From-Above, whoever the faceless figure may be, could not trust senators with their passports. “There is a directive from the Executive that no senator should travel out of the country until we finish consideration of this Bill,” Cheruiyot said on Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, other persons could not trust the wahesh in the National Assembly with a bottle of water. Who could blame anyone for slightly doubting politicians, though? And as Speaker Kenneth Lusaka aptly put it, someone thought it wise to have a backup plan. “We don’t take insurance because we want to get into accidents,” Lusaka had said over some unrelated subject. Being the talkers they are, senators, naturally, set their tongues off rambling.

One lamented that a colleague had been denied the right to fly his family abroad, and the rest grunted in unison, aware that the same fate could befall them.

None would want to be stopped from splurging taxpayers’ money in the Maldives, painting themselves white with sand, creating hills out of their public coffers-infested potbellies.

Another insisted on the need to undertake ‘training’ abroad, which would be curtailed by a travel ban. Training is code for the countless benchmarking excursions politicians take, the same ones that win them traveling companions that the wahesh wouldn’t want to inherit their property.

A senator decried an abuse of their rights to attend to personal matters, a general term that often implies traveling to seek treatment abroad. Of course, none spat it out, as they didn’t want to boast about their selflessness, exemplified by their willingness to forgo the best services, offered only in local facilities.

Being the custodians of county governments, to which health is devolved, senators must make sacrifices. And thanks to them, partly, our hospitals are never congested. Not by people or medication.

They wittered on. “No law obligates any senator to sit in the House,” Bungoma’s Moses Wetang’ula declared. So where does the law obligate senators to sit, Bwana Weta?

After an uninterrupted cathartic session, Speaker Lusaka promised, as he has over other matters in the past, to investigate the travel ban and issue a comprehensive report in two weeks. But there were more serious issues at hand, the Azimio Bill, for instance, that needed their attention. Unlike their colleagues in the lower House who were serving earthquakes, sabotaging House business, senators voted to pass the Bill, nearly mundu khu mundu, the next day.