Didmus Barasa just bought a brand new car for UDA fully paid for with insurance and free fuel to go. Kenyans are rightly furious with Didmus Barasa for grabbing a CDF car and handing it over to UDA as a campaign vehicle.
What we forget is that this is the way most MPs use CDF money and assets bought through CDF. To Kenyan MPs, CDF is their own personal money to do whatever they want to do for themselves and their families.
It is a shame when we hear William Ruto every day announcing the billions he is going to set aside to provide loans and services to Kenyans. Can Ruto and his ilk first start by giving a full account of what MPs have done with the billions provided to them every year as CDF?
They can’t do that because every one of those MPs running around Ruto is stealing the CDF money with no mercy for their constituents.
So when Kenyans hear Ruto make all those promises of new funding for Kenyans he actually means he needs to set up new bags of pocket money for MPs and other politicians to have a feast.
If they can’t account for the CDF they already have and which has been in existence for 20 years Ruto can add them more taxpayer money if he wants to but for goodness sake stop pretending that the new money will be used for development.
Read: Police seeking Didmus Barasa for theft of government vehicle
If the media could do Kenyans a favour and visit every MP office in the next couple of days they will find that all CDF vehicles are being used as private cars by MPs. This Barasa guy was just extra stupid to actually paint the car for UDA.
He would have used that car and campaigned for UDA with it the whole time and nobody would have bothered him.
I am hoping that Azimio will use this opportunity now that the attention of Kenyans has been drawn to the gross abuse of CDF resources to point out the need for full accountability of CDF and other public money at all levels of government.
Everybody is telling Kenyans how much money they will add to the system and nobody is telling how the money already out there is being used. Wouldn’t that be a starting if the politicians are serious about new money to help Kenyans?
Kenyans are waiting to hear what William Ruto whose picture is prominently painted in the stolen car will have the courage to at least condemn this theft which was carried out to help him win the election.
The other thing that is very troublesome is that if this is what UDA and their thieves are doing now before they come to power, what the heck are they going to do should they ever get the power to form a Kenyan government. Are they going to grab government buildings and paint them as party buildings?
It is the same thing we hear about Ruto’s running mate Rigathi Gachagua. A former Molo MP came out the other day to tell Kenyans how Rigathi as Molo DO attacked him, stripped him naked, and paraded him all across from town to town, and by the time he got back to his house it was already burnt to the ground and all Kikuyu folks in the neighborhood had been thrown out.
We have to ask ourselves what is that man going to do should he ever become Kenya’s Deputy President. And the strangest thing with Gachagua’s case is the whole hype that the DP had to be picked from the Kikuyu community.
How is it that a Kikuyu who was actually being used by the former president to kill Kikuyus and carry out ethnic cleansing in Molo is the one that Ruto chose?
Surely his actions as Moi’s DO were known to Ruto who decided to ignore all that. Isn’t that serious contempt for the Kikuyu community. Or is Ruto telling them that their votes are in his pocket already so it doesn’t really matter what Ruto does?
The other thing that should be pointed out is that there is a lot of political noise about the big financial debt that Kenya as a government owes and how difficult it is the service those loans. That is a legitimate issue of concern.
My problem is that we borrow that money to build all sorts of things and as soon as that money is in government hands it is stolen by the big boys in government. So we are paying loans plus interest on money that has been stolen. It is a double loss and that is a big part of the equation. When you borrow billions to build dams to improve people’s lives and build the economy and that money is stolen then you don’t have the dam but you still have to pay for the loan.
If we were to use the money we borrow to actually improve the economy it makes it that much easier to repay the loan. That is why I support Azimio’s idea of giving Shs 6,000 to Kenyans with low income. UDA chaps are telling us that money to poor Kenyans will expand our national expenditure.
The difference is that the money you give Kenyans directly goes to boost our economy as Kenyans spend it for their livelihoods. The other money stolen from our treasury is shipped to Qatar and other foreign countries to be used by the thieves. They only keep a little bit to give the churches as Harambee to buy real estate in heaven most likely hell if you ask me.
Adongo Ogony is a Human Rights Activist and a Writer who lives in Toronto, Canada
