”…Let them eat cake.” This statement is commonly misattributed to Marie Antoinette (Google and Bing search engines are your friends, please use them.) but it actually came from a French Author Jean-Jacque Rousseau, a Novelist in his day. The full excerpt goes

“Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat cake”."

I’m not surprised at our members of parliaments. Their recent sneaky (unsuccessful) move to make amends to have their pay and perks increase as one last hurrah has really annoyed Kenyans. Their action will have quite an effect on your wallet. There’s that new tax regime that will see mobile money tariffs of deposits and withdrawals increase by 10%, duty on beers have increased from 40% to 50%, 10% excise duty applied to financial institutions and there’s talk about taxing the data transfer market.

This doesn’t even include the adverse effect that rising global food prices is having on our economy, more so our wallets. The price of bread is on the rise, so is the price of electricity, until the rains get here. Fuel’s set to go up if the Iran issue isn’t contained soon. Really, every commodity seems to be rising up price-wise, despite economic inflation going down. It’s adding salt to an open wound; taxation.

I wonder what one Mr Githae, our dear minister of finance is thinking. He claims to be raising the taxes on these fast moving services to “raise money to pay teachers and civil servants”, after telling the public that there’s no money to pay the striking teachers, doctors, nurses, and civil servants. We, the consumers, are obviously feeling the pinch. That beer you used to buy for KES180 will now cost over KES200. And you haven't even got to top flight restaurants yet.

Retailers will now more than ever have more reason to pass on the expenses of these taxes on to us consumers, in attempts to keep profit margins stable, or at least profitable. Banks will have to recover the costs associated with these new taxes by raising the prices of doing business with them, such as raising costs of ATM charges, banking transactions and so on. Even so, members of parliament still want a tax free raise in perks and salaries.

Something’s not right here. Perhaps it’s just me, but I think it’s quite silly to raise taxes to cover for such a raise. That’s what I truly think these new taxes are there for. It is quite clear that Mr Githae has no idea what it’s like to be a middle or lower class Kenyan. Nor do the members of Parliament. We’re the ones feeling the pinch, we’re the ones forking out more money to survive, we’re the ones who have to think of how to get that money. Heck, we’re the ones that put these “decision makers” and “leaders” in office. Yet we can’t seem to get them out? What on earth justifies them to increase their salaries ever so often?

It seems the parliamentary salaries and remunerations commission is being blatantly ignored then.

What are we as price-conscious consumers going to do about this? We’ll make noise about the issue, throw a few petitions here and there that get stalled in court, have a “peaceful” protest and then the story will silently fade off into oblivion. We often vent frustrations and let go of the issue at hand shortly after.

I can't even begin to imagine Kenyans would do if Parliamentarians said let them eat cake, when there’s barely any bread to get us by.