A pupil at Sacred Heart Primary School plays on top of one of the desks bought using CDF cash in Likoni constituency. Photo/Gideon Maundu
By ALPHONCE SHIUNDU ashiundu@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Monday, March 14 2011 at 22:00
Posted Monday, March 14 2011 at 22:00
In Summary
- ‘Every public holiday, the DC would tell the crowd the government was looking into their grievances, but for decades, none was ever looked into’
Deal-cutting at State House, blended with a false promise of monetary returns to a former MP are part of the story behind the birth of the Constituency Development Fund eight years ago, a book has revealed.
Written by the architect of the CDF, Mr Muriuki Karue, the book exposes the political intrigues that had at first threatened the much-lauded programme.
The former Ol Kalou MP notes in his book that after he had worked on the Bill with the State Law Office, he knew it required the permission of the President because it was a charge on the government coffers.
“I had actually written to (the then Finance minister David) Mwiraria requesting him to obtain President Kibaki’s consent,” Mr Karue notes in his book.
First Reading
He went ahead, prepared the Bill and then submitted it to Parliament. The Bill went through the First Reading (introduction to Parliament), the Second Reading (debate), but it was only when it came up for amendment and final approval by Parliament that he was notified that the President had not granted any consent.
All along, he had assumed that because Mr Mwiraria had supported the Bill and that “the President had no objections”. But he was stopped in his tracks in Parliament by the then Speaker Francis ole Kaparo.
The message from the government was that the CDF had to be a government Bill for it to be allowed to proceed. That was in October 2003. Mr Karue was stranded. He was reluctant to part with his Bill after months of hard work.
“My real concern was that I had witnessed resistance by the government before, and feared the same could happen. Once I hand over, I would have no control. They might even decide not to present it at all, I thought,” the former MP recalls.
But MPs kept on the pressure and a month later, Mr Karue, through the then Leader of Government Business, Vice President Moody Awori, he got an appointment to State House, Nairobi.
“The message was clear. CDF was going to be a government Bill or not a Bill at all. I expressed my fear that the government might take it over and change it,” he recalled. “The President (Kibaki) committed that the Bill would not be altered.” It was at that point that he was promised money, in the form of an “ex-gratia compensation” for his efforts.
This is because the President and his men at the meeting reasoned that “for the government to develop something like that, it would have engaged researchers, maybe appointed a taskforce, developed a Sessional Paper, (assembled) a team to draft the Bill… all at great cost.”
The government kept part of its bargain of not altering the Bill, but not the money bit.
In January 2004, Mr Karue went to see Mr Awori to remind him of the “ex-gratia compensation” promise at State House.
“He asked me to propose in a letter what I thought was fair. That I did, including enormous amounts of documentation, printing and copying, use of my private office and my staff. MPs were not provided with offices those days,” he notes in his book titled Episodes from an MP’s Diary.
He is however tight-lipped about the amount he wanted the government to pay for his troubles.
Mr Karue waited and kept on reminding Mr Awori and Mr Mwiraria “informally” whenever they met in the corridors of Parliament. “They appeared blank and gave me the impression that somebody else was dealing with the matter,” he notes.
A year later, the government responded and told him that he wouldn’t be paid even a cent. One of the reasons given was that the government “had not found any precedent within the Commonwealth of refunding expenses that a member incurred in the course of legislative initiatives.”
“My response was that I did not think it was fair, and requested the government to reconsider that stand,” he says in his book. “First, we should not really hinge our small obligations on a precedent out there… Kenya was a full member of the Commonwealth equal to the others and could therefore be the precedent.”
The government kept quiet. Six months later, he was called to State House, on Jamhuri Day and President Kibaki decorated him with the Chief of the Burning Spear medal.
Though the MP gives a detailed account of the debate in Parliament and some of the key amendments to the CDF Bill, he gets personal in narrating his motivation for following through with the Bill.
He reminisces that in many national holidays before he was elected to Parliament — from May’s Labour Day to December’s Jamhuri Day — the district commissioner used to tell the crowd that “the government was looking into their grievances and requests.
“The ritual was the same year after year. For decades, none of the dispensaries were ever built, none of the schools, none of anything. It was very depressing. I presumed it was the same all over the country,” he says.
When he got to Parliament, he recalls one MP telling him that he had tried to start a primary school “but it remained a ramshackle, with dilapidated mud-walls and leaking thatched roof, with no desks and no toilets. Other MPs had same cries; a bridge needed here, a school roof blown off by the wind, a police post needed somewhere to curb insecurity,” the former lawmaker notes.
But when these concerns were raised in Parliament, just as it remains today, the answer remained the same: “Mr Speaker Sir, what the honourable member is asking is quite in order; it will be done as soon as funds become available.”
Like today, that answer opens doors to an infinite wait by the MP and his constituents.
“The funds never became available for any of the grassroots concerns,” Mr Karue laments. “In the same country where the government was building skyscrapers, villagers could not get a simple culvert to cross a stream that swelled every season. We had world-class hospitals but children were dying of minor ailments because there was no clinic anywhere for miles. We boasted of many beautiful universities, yet children in many rural areas were not going to school simply because there was no school to go to.”
One thing led to another and with the support of his fellow MPs and of course, the part that there was money to be managed by MPs, was enough to marshal Parliament to approve the motion.
With the President and his Finance minister in the loop, the CDF Act was born; in due course it became a reality.
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