MPs want ceilings removed and the allocations set to grow by 7.5 per cent yearly.
Members of Parliament have, once again, pulled off another selfish move. Just when Kenyans should be seeing the last of money games, MPs have sprung another surprise, designing their recurrent budget to expand automatically by 7.5 per cent every year.
In other words, the Budget and Appropriation Committee (BAC) is handing MPs an open cheque to spend as they please. So just like they have quarrelled in the past with the Salaries and Remuneration Commission over limits on pay and allowances, the MPs are determined to put their budgetary allocation beyond the scrutiny of the Treasury too.
And to blindfold the unsuspecting taxpayer into accepting the warped logic, the MPs have proposed to accord the same financing flexibility to the Judiciary.
The question then is how BAC arrived at the factor of 7.5 per cent. The law and tradition have been simple. The National Treasury is supposed to design a realistic annual budget based on the resource envelope at hand and feedback from citizens as to what are the most pressing issues through public participation.
And among other things, the intricate give and take ritual that underpins allocation to various government organs are normally arrived at as a calculus of projected tax revenues, strategic importance to the State and the ability of the recipient to absorb the funds.
That Parliament wants to circumvent this time-honoured process to assign itself public money without question speaks volumes of the attitude that the so called peoples’ representatives have adopted.
The MPs are simply telling us that the National Treasury can impose tight expenditure controls all its wants but Parliament’s recurrent costs will always balloon every year anyway.
We wish to take a position that the lawmakers are neither above the law nor should they be regarded as a special class of citizens.
Just like all other government departments, the allocation to parliament must be subjected to scrutiny and awarded with respect to the economic realities of the moment.
Otherwise, to allow their recurrent budget to rise by a constant factor, no matter what, is to encourage the profligate spending that has delayed the country’s economic takeoff for years.
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