KENYAN POLITICIANS were accused yesterday of plundering state coffers after awarding themselves a monthly pay rise of nearly 25 per cent, making them some of the best-paid legislators in the world.
After resisting calls to pay income tax for years, MPs finally agreed on Wednesday night to pay the tax, but only after giving themselves a sweetener of 240,000 shillings, taking their monthly pay to 1,091,000 shillings.
The news was greeted with anger in Kenya, where the minimum wage was last month raised to 5,800 shillings a month for employees in cities and 2,900 shillings for farm workers. Since 2003, when President Mwai Kibaki came to power, politicians have become notorious for regularly increasing their salaries.
“Yet another drastic pay hike for MPs . . . is the most outrageous, insensitive, immoral and intolerant abuse and impunity by Kenya’s officialdom the country has ever witnessed,” said the Kenya Alliance of Resident Associations.
On Wednesday MPs voted to adopt the report of former appeal court judge Akilano Akiwumi, who led a review of politicians’ salaries in the wake of public dissatisfaction. MPs’ exemption from tax on all but a fraction of their total pay – their effective tax rate is 5 per cent – was a source of particular resentment.
One recommendation was that politicians should pay tax on most of their salaries and allowances, although about a third of remuneration will remain tax free.
But instead of seeing their take-home pay reduced, ordinary MPs will be 11,700 shillings richer each month, even after tax, thanks to the salary boost. The monthly salaries of the 40 cabinet ministers will jump to 1.1m shillings, with pay rising by 5 per cent a year.
“When I heard this on the radio I prayed to God and said ‘What is happening in Kenya?’,” said Isaiah Khamala (38), who supports his wife and four children with the 9,600 shillings a month he earns as a gardener at a Nairobi restaurant. “There are people who still do not have homes after the [2007] election violence, yet MPs are just favouring themselves.”