Legislators should be serious about Parliament's power of the purse

The Kenyan national assembly is full of cowards. As the legislature sat to vote on the  2026/27.Finance Bill on Thursday night, only 162 out of 349 legislators were present in the House. Among them, 162 supported the bill while 40 opposed it. The bill passed, and now awaits presidential assent to become law. 

This episode is a reminder of the enduring cowardice of Parliament as an institution. As I have argued before, our legislators collectively behave like a previously cage animal that stays in the cage even after the door is opened simply through habit and cowardice.

The 2010 constitution created a presidential system with three co-equal branches of government. Under the supreme law, Parliament has ultimate authority over the budget. They can force their will on the executive regarding how the government collects and spends our taxes. 

They can also directly compel specific bureaucrats to act in certain ways through oversight and the power of the purse. If they so choose, they can be proud and independent representatives of the people in the national government.

It is therefore unfortunate that most of our legislators have chosen to behave differently both as individuals and collectively as a separate and co-equal branch of government. The annual Finance Bill and the overall budget process comprise the most important function of parliament.

The very origin of legislatures as institution was predicated on controlling how public moneys are spent. Parliament has “power of the purse.” In our case, the important of the budget process as a source of legislative power is twofold.

First, through the budget legislators can direct executive action in accordance to the views of their constituents. In other words, they need not sit on their hands and wait to oversee executive action ex-post.

They have the power to write into law and then fund what they want the executive to do. That is power. 

Second, through the budget process parliament can reach into the executive and control individual agencies and departments, thereby reinforcing their influence on executive action.

This can be achieved through threatening to cut the budgets of errant agencies, or via constraining legislation. Notice that the disaggregation of the executive in its constituent parts would also help the executive as a whole be more legible to the legislature, and untangle the incentives of individual officials within the executive bureaucracy. This, too, is power.

That less than 47% of legislators would show up for the most important revenue generation legislation betrays a complete lack of understanding of the institutional powers of Parliament. At the individual level, it indicates cowardice of the highest order. 

It is true that Kenyans most elect their legislators on the basis of their development record. And this calculus may have informed some legislators’ unwillingness to stick their necks out on the Finance Bill. However, there are some limits to this assumption.

Kenyans increasingly care about specific laws – especially those that touch on taxation. Which is to say that legislators may not simply skip sittings in the hope that their CDF projects will help them win elections. The salience of taxation means that they must show up for certain forms of legislation. Above all, showing up is not just about the next election. It is also about leadership. And on this score, the 187 legislators who simply did not bother to show up betrayed supreme cowardice.