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Starehe Member of Parliament Amos Mwago has said they were blackmailed and threatened before the vote on the controversial Finance Bill of 2024.

The Jubilee Party legislator is among the 115 MPs who voted against the bill that sailed through to the Third Reading after 204 gave it a nod.

During the process of making the bill and the 2024/25 budget, Mwago said that the MPs were threatened by Treasury that if the Finance Bill did not pass, they were going to face fund cuts.

“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 said that the move to threaten the MPs by cutting funds for essential services was just targeting to elicit emotions and thereby get 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.

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