No taxation, No representation

Daily Nation

By MUTAHI NGUNYI

Posted Saturday, November 29 2008 at 15:12

This is a letter to the Members of Parliament. I will be blank and to the point. Good people, you are a disgrace to our nation.

No. You have actually become a curse to the poor. Beyond your bellies and the shiny cars you drive, you have no vision.

Now you have refused to pay tax. And to support your evil scheme, you have pimped two lies. One, that you are protected by the constitution. Big fat lie!

Even the judges, who argue protection, are wrong. Like the judges, you are misinterpreting the constitution to feed your greed.

Two, that you need the money to attend to funerals and other harambees at the constituency. Zero! With CDF, we do not need your cheap money. The constituency is being supported by our taxes, not your salaries.

IN FACT, I SUSPECT THAT YOU ARE stealing from the poor through CDF. My point? You have no point. Because of your greed, you have misread the mood of the nation.

And this is why I am attending the December 12 protest rally against you. All I need to know is the time, the place and the how!

I am inspired into civil disobedience by a 1968 book entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. According to this Brazilian thinker, “…freedom is acquired by struggle, not by gift”

And those afraid of struggle, must be seen as siding with the oppressor. I want to submit to you that you have become the ‘new oppressors’.

You came to us as liberators from the Moi order. We trusted you with the change agenda and the liberation programme. But instead of bringing change, you conspired to steal from us.

This is how you increased your salaries to unimaginable figures. And we allowed you to. Now we are tired. We have realised that silence is the tool of oppression.

There is one more thing: you continue to underestimate our resolve. And on this, you are downright deluded. I want to put it to you that Kenyans are the most alert lot in Africa.

In Nigeria the Generals stole an election, the people cowed in fear. In South Africa, the party ‘thugs’ staged a palace coup against Thabo Mbeki, the people stared in disbelief. They did nothing.

In Zimbabwe, President Mugabe stole an election in broad daylight; the people whined and complained. They did nothing.

In Kenya, president Kibaki got some judge to swear him in at night; the people said “No!” In sum, our threshold for political non-sense is very low.

If you are not with the people, you are with the enemy. And on the matter at hand, the people have said “No!” No taxation, no representation!

If you will not be taxed, you cannot represent us. The question however is: are you reading the anger? Can you feel the groundswell against you as people seethe in resentment? Given your greed, I doubt it!

I have two other reasons why I will attend the December 12 rally against you. In January this year, we were at the brink of civil war. Now that some of you are on the ‘Waki List’, you have threatened a repeat.

And on this one, you have missed the point again. You want to use our young people as a human shield to protect your evil deeds.

In the meantime, you have not even resettled the IDPs and have no intentions, it seems. I will be attending the December 12 rally therefore to serve notice on two accounts.

One, if you do not style up, the next ‘civil war’ will be between us, the people, and you. That the people have no glitch with each other. Our problem is you. Two, in the past, we thought you were the change makers.

Now we know we were wrong. We know that “…change is us”. The notice to you therefore is this: if you persist in your ways, change is coming.

It might not be the tsunami you talk about, but it will come in small instalments – little by little. After all, revolutions are made from small things.

In fact, the French revolution of 1789 was about ‘ugali’. And this brings me to the second reason why I will engage in civil disobedience come December 12.

Together with the food cartels, you have formed a class of ‘pigs’ similar to the one in George Orwell’s book The Animal Farm.

And your declaration to Kenyans is this: “…All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”. Your point? The class of ‘pigs’ has a right to enjoy Sh800,000 untaxed and to exploit the poor through food and petroleum cartels.

Like in this story, you are also telling us that the ‘government of pigs’ has a right to do anything it wishes. And this is why during one of the parties, the pigs sold a horse called Boxer for a crate of whisky.

I am therefore going to the December 12 rally to say “No way!” You will not use our children as a human shield from the ‘Waki process’.

SIMILARLY, YOU WILL NOT SELL the poor to the cartels for a box of whisky or whatever they give you. I am going to this rally to protest ‘economic impunity’.

Back to Paulo Freire’s book the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he tells us that Reality=the actual + the possible. This means that the reality we want as a country can be created through the possible.

But more fundamentally that the future is not something hidden in a corner: the future is something we build in the present.

And the present in now! This is, therefore, the time to stop the evil visited upon us by your lot.

Your constituents must stand up against you and be counted. My name is Mutahi Ngunyi, Citizen Number 4855678 and I want to be counted! Hon Kabando wa Kabando, I will be on your case if you refuse to pay tax!

Mutahi Ngunyi is a political scientist with The Consulting House, a policy and security think-tank for the Great Lakes region and West Africa.