Twenty-one bills I will put on the floor.

One relieved car every seven years, for every Kenyan

A Member of Parliament receives KSh 7,550,000 from the public purse to buy a vehicle, once a term. A teacher, a nurse or a small contractor receives nothing and pays every shilling. Relieve the taxes Kenya itself controls — excise duty, VAT, the railway development levy and the import declaration fee — on one vehicle per Kenyan every seven years, and take the customs duty question to the East African Community Council of Ministers, which is where that decision actually sits.

Sell or transfer it inside the seven years and every relieved shilling falls due before the logbook changes hands. This is a relief for a Kenyan buying a car, not a licence for a dealer to borrow a stranger's entitlement.

The principle is not new, only the beneficiary. A foreign attaché imports a car free of tax and drives it on roads Kenyan taxpayers built. Nairobi hosts one of the four United Nations headquarters cities and one of the largest diplomatic corps on the continent, so we extend that courtesy far more often than our own diplomats will ever receive it abroad. If it is affordable when the beneficiary is a foreign mission, it is affordable when the beneficiary is a Kenyan nurse.

Excise Duty Act · VAT Act · Miscellaneous Fees and Levies Act · EAC Common External Tariff

No Kenyan tax on a million shillings of household goods a year

A flat annual entitlement, the same for everyone: one million shillings of household goods relieved of the taxes Kenya itself controls. Not pegged to income, because pegging it to income would hand the biggest relief to the highest earner. Register once a year with KRA for a thousand shillings, nominate a licensed clearing agent of your choice so the entitlement can be tracked across shipments, and import.

Kenya is a net importer and has been for decades. The taxes on the goods a family actually uses stopped being industrial policy a long time ago and became a revenue line. Competition is global now. A manufacturer who cannot meet an imported product on quality and price is not being protected, only postponed.

VAT Act · Excise Duty Act · Miscellaneous Fees and Levies Act

Childcare support for a working mother is not a taxable benefit

Where an employer meets the cost of a domestic worker for an employee who is the mother of a child under twelve, that support stops being taxed as a benefit in her hands. Kenya's own Time Use Survey put women's unpaid domestic and care work at 25.8 billion hours a year against 4.8 billion for men. This is Article 27(6) doing the job it was written to do.

And the relief has to reach the house help too. The domestic worker must be named, contracted and paid through payroll, with NSSF and SHA. A workforce that has always been invisible gets a payslip.

The relief attaches to a caregiver certified at a homecraft centre or village polytechnic. Those institutions already sit with the counties under the Fourth Schedule, and most of them are half empty. Put a market behind them and child care becomes a trade a young woman can qualify in, not just work she falls into.

Income Tax Act · Constitution, Article 27(6)

An education relief for every parent paying for a child's schooling

A capped relief against tax for each child in school, claimable on documented education spending — private school fees, the levies that make "free" education anything but free, or the cost of registered home education. The same ceiling for every parent, so a family paying forty thousand a term gets the same relief as a family paying four hundred.

You already pay for schools through your taxes. Paying a second time to educate your own child, and being taxed on the income you use to do it, is the middle class squeeze in one sentence.

And this is not a Kilimani problem. In Nairobi's informal settlements the majority of primary age children are in fee-charging APBET schools, not in the free public school down the road. When a parent in Kawangware earning almost nothing still finds school fees every term, that is a verdict on what the State is delivering. The right response is to stop taxing the sacrifice and to bring those schools onto a register where somebody actually inspects them.

Income Tax Act · Basic Education Act · APBET Policy Guidelines

Recognise home education, and let it regulate itself

The Basic Education Act does not mention home education at all, which leaves thousands of families in a legal grey zone and every one of their children outside any quality floor. Recognise it, and regulate it the way a serious country regulates professionals: not with a permit, with a register.

Families organise into an association. The association retains a TSC-registered teacher for quality assurance, keeps records, and stays open to inspection by the county education office. The parent notifies the County Director of Education, and if nobody objects within thirty days the child is registered. Every learner sits assessment with KNEC or an accredited body, because an inspection can be negotiated and a result cannot.

It also puts people to work. Kenya has 343,485 trained teachers registered with the Teachers Service Commission and not employed by it, in a country whose schools are short of teachers. A recognised home education sector gives a qualified teacher with no classroom a profession again, and it costs the exchequer nothing.

No approval to buy, no officer to visit, no file that moves faster with an envelope on it. The State keeps the powers that matter — the register, the inspection, the sanction — and gives up only the one that has never protected a single child: the rubber stamp.

Basic Education Act · ICESCR Article 13(3) · Constitution, Articles 11 and 44

Family businesses treated like the businesses they are

Each director or shareholder of a family business may have one vehicle and one house provided every five years. The company takes it as an allowable deduction and it is not treated as a taxable benefit. Big corporates structure this already; family firms should not be punished for being small.

Income Tax Act

Let private sector workers choose their own fund manager

Private sector employees should be free to move their pension to any fund manager and manage it wholly themselves. Your retirement should not be captive to a single scheme.

National Social Security Fund Act

Public Finance (Public Loans) Act

Two rules, plainly stated:

• Money may only be borrowed for capital projects that have already been designed and planned.
• Every loan must be repayable within seven years.

Borrowing to fund recurrent spending is how a country ends up paying for yesterday out of tomorrow.

Public Procurement (Value for Money) Act

An investigative power to establish whether government is being overcharged for goods and services, tested against level of effort, industry benchmarks and the market cost of materials. Contracts such as the SHA system would be squarely within its reach.

No tender larger than the company behind it

A procurement award for goods may not exceed the bidder's turnover as filed with KRA over the last five years, tested alongside the PAYE it has actually paid for its employees. This is how you lock out the briefcase tenderpreneur without adding a single new form for a real business.

Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act

Repeal SHA and re-enact an elevated NHIF

The fund is rebuilt with the money kept away from the people who spend it:

• NHIF funds held by tier 1 banks as trustees.
• Payments dispensed by health insurance companies, not by the fund itself.
• Government's role limited to policy.
• Eight health insurance regions, each managed by a separate provider.
• A claims manager must be a company that has operated in health insurance for the last fifteen years.

Public money shall never pay for private health insurance

A single, unambiguous prohibition. If the public scheme is good enough for citizens, it is good enough for the officials who run it.

Third party claims paid within three days

Motor vehicle third party insurance carries a mandatory payment period of three days. Investigation becomes the insurer's own responsibility — and its own cost — not a reason to keep a claimant waiting for years.

Insurance (Motor Vehicles Third Party Risks) Act

Micro-Insurance Act

A legal home for community-run insurance as a genuine alternative to formal insurance companies — the chama principle, given standing and protection in law.

Enforcement Conduct Act

Enforcement against Kenyan-owned businesses must aim at getting them compliant, not at extracting a payment. The Act would carry:

• Principle of first contact. An agency making first contact cannot, in that same instance, impose obligations for past conduct.
• Principle of rewarding compliance. An entity with a high compliance score is given time to remedy a default rather than penalised for it.
• A business licence and permits tribunal for every five counties, to determine rejected applications.

Distribution permits and other county road-blocks

County distribution permits, and the family of permits whose only real function is to slow a business down until someone is paid, go.

Pay ten per cent on application, the balance on issue

No more paying a permit fee in full and then waiting on an officer's goodwill. Ten per cent accompanies the application; the balance falls due only once the permit is actually issued.

NCA registers and investigates — it does not issue permits

The National Construction Authority becomes a notification and breach-investigation body. Anyone who wants to build obtains an NCA registration free of charge and uses that number to make applications across every other agency.

National Construction Authority Act

Separate injury offences from paperwork offences

Traffic offences are categorised as injury offences, non-injury offences and compliance offences. Non-injury and compliance offences carry no custodial sentence. A defective reflector is not a reason to spend a night in a cell.

Traffic Act

A traffic court that is online, and open when the road is

• Fully online, sitting from 5:00am to midnight.
• Heard by adjudicators who are lawyers of at least two years' standing, engaged ad hoc and part-time, as are the prosecutors.
• The arresting officer must appear at the first hearing as the principal witness.

An officer who has to show up in court is an officer who cannot make the case disappear at the roadside.

Traffic Act

Compliance offences settled by ticket in seven days

A ticket, a fixed sum, seven days to pay. No court, no negotiation at the window, no lost working day.

Traffic Act