From: Tebiti Oisaboke
Date: Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:03 AM

I have read with great dismay the payment or salary structure review resently conducted with the Price Water House Coopers (K) for CEOs in state corporations. The results are appalling, disgusting, absurd and pathetic to say the least. I can’t believe that some folks are make millions of shillings just for signing some paperwork. Most CEOs don’t do anything substantial to warrant these huge payments. Most of the work is done by the smallman and their job is just to autograph work documents already done by their subordinates. And most of these CEOs are underqualified for the designations assigned to them, because appointments to these prime posts is the delegatory of the president, and s/he may choose to pick anybody they so wish, as so long as this chap is able and willing to dance to the president’s tunes. In past administrations, the CEOs survived by plundering funds from their institutions and offer one half of their loots to “Mama Ngina Children’s Home” then it became “Kabarak High School”, “Moi Forces Accademy” etc later on. If you couldn’t do such kind of crab, you are done with and God what happens to you there after.

It is very unfair for a few clique members close to the inner circle, to make all they can make out of the sweat of the poor of the poorest folks who work their behinds to death making peanuts in only to sustain the lifestyles of the top 5% of Kenya’s population. This is inhuman and unacceptable in this day and age. That is why when President Obama came to power, he immediately slashed the Wall Street’s CEOs income along with those in the financial sector by a half on his second day in office. That was a job well done because these guys were squandering the tax payers money for nothing. We need an office manager who is brilliant, strong and couragious enough to stand and defend his employers. Someone who can constantly remind these folks that they ain’t the bosses but people’s servants. Right now, we have over 10 million Kenyans whose lives are technically hanging on the fringe of death due to the on going government inciated genocide starvation nationwide, while the government is handing out tens of millions of cahs to just a few Kenyans monthly, while forgeting about the starving poor man in the street. The gap between the poor and the elite folks in Kenya is very wide, simply because those who have broken the glass prism and graduated to the well insulated perimeters with the “Umbwa Kali” signs in front of their gates, don’t care about the straggling poor any more. I wonder how these Ksh. 3.9M, folks can managed to eat and sleep comfortably when millions of their country men are exterminating the wild animals, reptiles, poisonous fruits and scarvanging for food with birds. What these folks seem to forget is that, the late self crowned life president of the Central African Republic, Emporer Bokasa spent $3M of the state’s funds to purchase himself some bedroom furniture made of gold, from France while his people were dieying of hunger. As that wasn’t enough, he ordered the massacre of over 100 young kids – something which raise an uproar in his poor country and was overthrown in 1979. Emporer Haile Silasie of Ethiopia used to feed his dogs beef while his people starved to death. Gen. Mingistu Haile Mariamu got fed up and kicked him out of office in 1974.

In my opinion, there is no country on earth which can prosper if its people are hungry, sick, illiterate and unsecure. It doesn’t make any sense at all, to pay a single individual a monthly take home cheque of Ksh. 3.9M when millions of your people go without any basic nutritions for a good number of days. I also know that most administrative systems in Africa are crumbled, but they can be fixed with a good licensed driver. Unlicensed drivers such as those who drive themselves to power by the barrel of the gun or stealing the office keys from the ballot boxes can not and will not fix any disfranchised system. We should not read such news in the papers and just ignore them because by doing so, those people will think that “it’s life as normal” otherwise folks seem not to care!! Our local MPs with whom we have “bestowed” the authority of being our watchdogs, seem not to be doing what we hired them for. Stuff like this should be arrested and questioned by them and not the PWH-Coopers. Why don’t they raise red flags when they hear that certain CEOs are making a fortune out of the hard earned Kenyan shilling? They know how much each and every CEO makes because they’re the same folks who clears their wages through through Prince Kenyatta’s office. Years back, it was the expertrates who used to make such kind of “out of limit” wages but their jobs started to be nationalized through Kenyanization programme of 1967 and by the early 1970s most of thes prime positions were held by indiginious Kenyans whose wages were peged according to services they provided.

The expertrates who were retained, were only retained while the country was looking for a suitable Kenyan to take over such as Doctors, RNs,Accountants, Engineers etc. It was meant to be like that always but it is not. In the “Man-Eat-Man Soceity” as was described one time at the death of the EAC in 1977, by Mwalim Julius K. Nyerere, job appointments are
not dished out to the most quolified candidate, but to who knows who basis. Remember Mr. Joseph Kamere or is it Kamero, Kenya’s second AG or Mulu Mutisia? Mutisia ended up in the August house in 1974 as NMP without any accademic credentials but just because he happened to know who was who in Kenya. And his position of being the Chairman of the New Akamba Union, may have played a roll. The chap couldn’t even autograph his own signature. Kamere himself looked like someone who had just got here from another planet not even knowing he was an AG!!!.

God Bless Kenya
TOI

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Subject: Ksh. 3.9 M for signing paperwork?