Overpaid and underperforming - Is Kenya’s Parliament really worth what we're paying for?

• Kenya is ranked second globally by that measure, only topped by Nigeria, who is an obvious reference in building functional societies.
• You would think this pay would translate into on over-served public, in terms of just how many progressive policies can be pushed at a go.

Traders went to the streets this month over the cost of bringing goods into the country. The customs benchmark on consolidated cargo had been raised and the margins were being squeezed, so the people who import for a living made their objection loudly enough to be heard.

Within days, the president ordered the valuation reverted, ordered an exemption from the new declaration requirements, and the matter was settled. The traders got relief and the story moved on.

However, and this has been raised in certain circles of the internet… by what authority does a president set and unset the terms of taxation by instruction?

Article 210 of the Constitution could not be any clearer: no tax or licensing fee may be imposed, waived, or varied except as provided by legislation. Taxation is the defining function of a legislature. It is the reason parliaments exist at all, the original bargain out of which representative government was invented. And here it was, adjusted in an afternoon by a single man, with the elected chamber neither consulted nor, apparently, missed.

Before you go up in arms, I do not dispute the decision. I believe that the traders were right and the relief was warranted. The problem is the route, and what the route tells us about an entire arm of government that watched its central constitutional function performed by somebody else and said nothing at all.

Kenyan MPs' basic salary

Kenyans pay handsomely for that silence too. Parliament's budget ceiling for the last financial year was Sh49.5 billion. Members draw a gross monthly package around Sh739,600, and the mileage allowance alone, before anything else is counted, costs the public roughly Sh1.83 billion a year. There are 417 legislators in total, 350 in the National Assembly and 67 in the Senate, for a country of about 55 million people, which brings me to an over-representation argument.

Take, for instance, the United States. Congress seats 535 members for a population above 340 million and an economy 250 times ours. That works out to roughly one federal legislator for every 635,000 Americans. Kenya has one for every 132,000 citizens. We have, in per-capita terms, close to five times the representation of the world's largest economy, and we are very evidently, not five times better governed.

The pay comparison is even worse. Analysis by the UK's parliamentary standards authority alongside IMF figures put Kenyan MPs' basic salary at roughly 76 times national GDP per capita. The equivalent figure is 3.7 for American legislators and 2.7 for British ones. Ours are among the best compensated lawmakers on earth relative to the wealth of the people they represent. In fact, Kenya is ranked second globally by that measure, only topped by Nigeria, who is an obvious reference in building functional societies (I am being sarcastic, btw). You would think this pay would translate into on over-served public, in terms of just how many progressive policies can be pushed at a go, no? Well…

Kenya has signed international instruments against enforced disappearance. Parliament has never passed a law criminalising it as a specific offence, which is why prosecutors reach for lesser charges while 82 documented disappearances since 2024 produce almost nothing. More than 120 people have died in and around protests in the same period. No parliamentary inquiry has produced a sanction that anyone can name.

Borrowing has repeatedly exceeded the ceilings Parliament itself set, and the ceilings were adjusted rather than enforced. The Finance Act 2026 was signed into law two days before the anniversary of the deaths its predecessor caused.

Reduction of representatives

When the High Court ruled in June that the Cabinet violates the two-thirds gender rule, Parliament appealed. The legislature went to court, at public expense, to defend the executive's flagrant breach of the Constitution. The arm, created by the constitution to keep the executive in check, rushed to court to defend the executive’s right to violate the same law. There is absolutely no reading of separation of powers in which that is a legislature behaving like one.

This is what an imperial presidency looks like in practice. Simply a slow migration of authority from the branch that was given it to the branch that wanted it, permitted at every stage by people who found surrender, or as alleged multiple times, acceptance of bribes by the state, more comfortable than confrontation. Separation of powers is not self-executing. It rests on an assumption the framers of 2010 considered safe: that each branch would jealously defend its own turf. Kenya has tested that assumption and found it more optimistic than it is practical.

Which brings us to the conversation we are about to have wrongly. There is renewed talk of redrawing boundaries and creating additional constituencies, on the theory that Kenyans are inadequately represented. Before a single new seat is contemplated, the country deserves an honest answer to a prior question: what do the existing 417 actually do? What has this Parliament stopped? Which excess has it reversed, which minister has it removed, which unlawful borrowing has it refused to ratify after the fact? What is it about the existing parliament that makes any sensible person think, “You know what we need? More of this.”. Please tell me.

We are not suffering from too little representation. We are suffering from too much of it doing too little, if any at all, at a price that wealthier nations wouldn’t deem useful enough to sustain. Sh49.5 billion a year buys a great many things. In this republic it buys a house that serves the purpose of a choir for State House. We could get an actual talented choir for much less than Sh50 Billion every year. In fact, I’d wager we could get one in every ward across the country, and it might be a more useful return to the economy than parliament as currently constituted.

Until we know what to do with the reduction of representatives, I think a good place to start from is to sweep like 95 per cent of them out in the coming elections. I think that’s a fair place to start.

• 

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