A lobby group is calling out Mombasa MPs on their duties in Parliament.
Muslims for Human Rights wants to put the MPs to task and determine their level of participation in debates that directly affect Mombasa residents.
Muhuri chairman Khelef Khalifa said this will make residents better understand the leaders they elected and whether they are fit to continue representing them.
“After analysing the whole situation with the MPs over, especially the SGR and the port, we thought we had a duty to expose them for who they really are,” Khalifa said on phone on Thursday.
He said most politicians take advantage of residents' ignorance and manipulate them into thinking they are serving them well.
“The job of an MP is to legislate, oversight and most of all to represent the people who elect them to Parliament. In most cases, the MPs do not represent their people because they are self-serving,” the Muhuri chair said.
Instead, the MPs only make noise outside Parliament for the cameras but do little in the House, he said.
The organisation has written to the National Assembly clerk Michael Sialai requesting to be furnished with Hansard reports of all House debates on SGR directives and the privatisation of the Container Terminal 2.
They want to determine the level of participation of all Mombasa lawmakers in the National Assembly and Senate and give a scorecard.
Khalifa, in the June 29 letter to Sialai, said several government policies, like the SGR directives, which required SGR-only haulage of cargo, have resulted in job losses and economic recession in the county.
“Though the court suspended the latest SGR directive requiring cargo to be cleared in Naivasha, the government has done nothing to overturn the negative impact it had on the Mombasa economy,” he wrote.
He also cited the government's attempt to privatise the CT2 before the court also stopped it last year.
He said Muhuri expects thorough representation of electorates.
“Voters also expect MPs to jealously – and per the law – guard their economic interests and rebuff punitive policies,” Khalifa said in the letter.
Speaking to the Star, he said once they gauge the level of participation of the legislators in such crucial debates, they will explain it to the public and let them make their own conclusions about the leaders they elected.
“When MPs fail to do their work in Parliament, out here it's just politics. We thought we should educate members of the public on who their leaders really are."
He said most leaders think building schools is enough.
“These schools are built with public money and then the MPs take a lot of credit for them. In most cases, the people even do not participate in the decision-making process to build the schools as they should in the first place,” he said.
He said there are MPs who go to Parliament and only make their maiden speech then stay silent for the whole of the five-year term.
Edited by R.Wamochie
