With these silly Bills, who needs MPs in Kenya?

In the 2013 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) results, Eldas District in Wajir County was ranked number 275 out of 280 listed educational districts. The previous year, in 2012, it wasn’t even ranked at all, the performance was very bad.

In the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results, the region again performed dismally, with its top schools getting mean scores that would not even match those of the worst-performing schools in other parts of the country.

The poor performance is understandable, given the hardships of the North Eastern region of Kenya in general, and of Wajir in particular: residents are largely fed by one or other NGO, and the delivery and distribution of relief food is a mainstay of the local economy.

Water is scarce, with various donor agencies drilling one or two wells here and there for the locals to water their herds of camels. In addition to water scarcity, there are also very few electricity connections.

The quality of schools is terrible, and healthcare for the majority of the locals is a pipe dream. The region as a whole scores very poorly on virtually all development indices — again, not a fault of the locals, but rather a consequence of systematic neglect and willful marginalisation by successive governments in Nairobi.

So alienated are the residents of the region that it is not uncommon to hear them talk of “going to Kenya” when leaving Wajir County.

And then there is insecurity: the residents of Wajir and surrounding areas have been plagued by repeated atrocities — some reported, some swept under the carpet — committed by two actors.

First is the Al Shabaab and related pseudo-religious militias from Somalia on the one hand, and the Kenya security forces on the other.

Al Shabaab have taken to lobbying grenades into crowded markets in the region, while clan wars have devastated whatever little peace there was left over after the Kenya security forces conducted their punitive “clean up” operations.

With such a horrific situation in the county, one would expect that the region’s elected representatives would be working overtime to make life a little easier for their voters.

One would also be wrong: Eldas MP Adan Keynan, instead of leading efforts to make life more bearable for his constituents, has some rather more frivolous concerns on his mind. He had all the time in the world to craft and take to bunge a Bill that seeks to achieve utterly ridiculous aims.

And to prove that Kenyan parliamentarians are very idle, they debated it, consulted, argued and lobbied for and against it before it sailed through. It now awaits presidential assent to become law.

The Order of Precedence Bill 2014, Keynan’s legislative baby, will decree who can and who cannot be referred to as “Your Excellency”, fly the national flag, among other trivialities.

Anyone referring to a mere Member of County Assembly (MCA) as “The Honourable” will be liable to be fined a minimum of Sh1 million, as will any soul with the temerity to refer to a county governor as “Your Excellency”.

Keynan also wants to ban governors from flying the national flag on their cars, and to make it illegal for governors to have vehicles with sirens.

Meanwhile, his constituency rots — school results aren’t getting better, healthcare provision is atrocious, and water is still a problem. The Kenyan taxpayer is paying MPs a lot of money to “bring development”. Honourable Keynan, how will not calling mere governors “Your Excellency” put food on the table of your constituents?

Clearly, if that is what he considers representation, then Keynan best illustrates why Kenya does not need MPs, in the first place.

Surely, with all the problems facing Kenyans, why would MPs waste time on silly Bills? Do we really need these clowns?