Dear most honorable, most gracious, most industrious and most illustrious Member of Parliament. I lay prostrate before you, humbled by the power you (purportedly) wield over those that dare to whittle down your remuneration. So I salute you as I would anyone who earns my respect for demanding what is not rightfully yours and trying to hold 40 million citizens at ransom in the process. Buoyed by your churlish behaviour, you have now infected the county ward representatives with your reprehensible avarice as they are now demanding almost four times more than what their salaries are currently scaled at.

So I figured that perhaps I should undertake to impart to you two extremely rudimentary lessons in mathematics and English. I base my knowledge on the fact that I have been both an employer and an employee in my short lifetime and can thus speak with moral authority on the subject of employee remuneration. I will start with the easy one. I suggest you take out your pen and write the following word: “Pleonexia”. It is an ancient word that quite poetically does the linguistic work that simpler words like greed or avarice fail to capture. The word, according to linguists, is a diagnosis of a covetousness that is not healthy, actually quite abnormal. It is compared to anorexia which is the pathological extremity of a brand of asceticism. Sorry, have I lost you? I thought so. I’ll break it down for you: basic need morphs into desire, which can mature as greed, that graduates most ungraciously into pleonexia. And that is the end of the English lesson.

Now let us begin the mathematics lesson. I want you to know that I am writing very, very, V-E-R-Y, slowly. This is to enable you to understand the slightly relatively simple arithmetic that I want to share. I would like to draw your attention to the table above. The first think you will note is that revenue (that amazing thing that happens when one undertakes a productive, economic activity that generates a return, usually in the form of an item of value: in this case, cash) is lower than expenditure (that other amazing thing that happens when you have to spend revenue in order to obtain goods or services that you require). This is really not as rare as a sighting of Hailey’s comet or mankind landing on Mars. It is, quite extraordinarily, a very common event. In fact I quite reckon that this is a situation you Mr/Ms MP and you Mr/Ms. County Assembly Representative would be very familiar with.

The second item to note – I do apologize most profusely if I am moving too fast – is that the income taxes my fellow Kenyans pay from working hard at their places of economic production constitute 40% in the current financial year and almost 50% in the next financial year of total revenue. I can therefore say, with unapologetic conviction I might add, that I pay 40% of your salary from my salary. Interesting is it not? And this is probably where there is a divergence of our views. The Government does NOT pay your salary. WE DO! The Government is a post office of sorts; it collects our money and distributes it according to its budget. The government is an agent for channeling the revenue derived from the Kenyan citizen’s economic productivity. You should be well aware that the taxes we pay on purchase of goods and services (VAT and excise duty) and importation of goods (import duty) also contribute to the revenue. So even if Joe Blow dodges paying income tax, he will still generate revenue to the government