Starehe Member of Parliament Amos Mwago has disclosed that he and other legislators faced coercion and intimidation prior to the vote on the contentious Finance Bill of 2024.
Mwago, a member of the Jubilee Party, was among the 115 MPs who voted against the bill, which ultimately passed to the Third Reading with the support of 204 MPs.
According to Mwago, during the deliberations on the Finance Bill and the 2024/25 budget, Treasury officials threatened MPs with funding cuts if the Finance Bill did not pass.
This pressure from the Treasury aimed to ensure the bill’s approval, highlighting the tense atmosphere surrounding fiscal decisions in Parliament.
“There were some elements who were trying to blackmail the MPs. If you look at the budget-making process, it is not an event but a process that entails a lot and requires coordination between the Treasury, the Budget Committee, and the Finance Committee.
“When these people were drafting this, they acted as if they were not in tandem with what the people on the ground were saying. They tried to blackmail us by making threats that they would cut funding for JSS, the medical interns, and CDF.
“But these measures were like the last stroke that kicked a dying horse because we were trying to bring the measures inside parliament when the mood was so clear that we were going to vote against the bill,” Mwago said during the K24 New Dawn show on Friday, June 21, 2024.
Elicit emotions
The MP stated that the tactic of threatening MPs with cuts to essential service funds was merely a strategy to manipulate emotions and garner support for the bill.
“When they saw the bill was going to fail, that is when they pulled that card, which even the Minority Leader argued against. He said that the CS for Treasury does not have the mandate to address parliament.
“By trying to say he was cutting the funding, he was trying to elicit public emotions, trying to show people that failure to pass the bill would affect their livelihoods. But that is not true.
“In the last Finance Bill, coming into the end of the financial year, they missed the target by over Ksh200 billion in revenue collection. What did they do? They started cutting capital spending and recurrent spending,” Mwago added.
