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"id": 100679,
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"speaker_name": "Ms. Abdalla",
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"legal_name": "Amina Ali Abdalla",
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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir. As my colleagues have done, I beg to regrettably oppose the Report from the Committee on the recruitment of the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) Director. The question I asked myself was answered by the Mover of the Report when he told the House that it was clear that the law was not broken, and that the Minister had a choice to promote someone internally. This is the first time some resemblance of transparent recruitment is happening at KAA. The last three directors have been political appointees. Due to the transition that this country is going through, where we are now going through transparent processes of recruiting our CEOs, we are bound to have some teething problems. But, nonetheless, that does not nullify the fact that the law was not broken. We have enough cases of Ministers flouting recruitment procedures as stipulated in the law. In this case, the law was not broken. In fact, the only argument that the Committee put forth was the five days which was thoroughly demolished by hon. Mbadi. These days, you are called on interviews depending on the level of the job you are applying. So, the argument of five days does not hold water and more so, this is a repeat advert. One of the functions of a human resource firm is to keep a data base of the caliber of people you are looking for. So, the firm would have communicated to those who did not see the advert to apply. So, I believe that the five day issue does not hold any water. I am concerned about the recommendation that was made by this Committee on the competence of Manpower Services. Manpower Services is the firm that gave us all the members of the Commissions that this House passed. So, in that sense, you are saying that their competence is in question. You are saying that all the Commissions that are going to carry out the referendum and the proposed Constitution are incompetent. However, more importantly, I served in the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Review of the Constitution (PSC). One of the things that we noticed is that when we advertized for an HR firm to do the recruitments that we were dealing with, among the top five, only two applied. When they were asked, they told us that they were fearful of dealing with processes that have political involvements, especially from politicians. So, when we are criticizing a HR firm, we better have more strong arguments against their actions that would be used to discredit their credibility and put them out of business; that, recommendations need to be looked at afresh. The Seconder of the Motion dealt with another matter which was totally out of that, and which I support. He said that eight out of 11 members of the Board come from one region, and he had an issue with that. Yes, that is an equal opportunity issue and it should be addressed. That Board needs to show the face of Kenya. However, that is separate from when somebody has gone through an interview process and scores 90 per cent. It is obvious that when you have been a teacher in a certain school and you know everything that is wrong in that school, you will definitely be able to answer questions better than outsiders or people with less experience. However, for you to say that the current MD scored 90 per cent shows that we got an extremely qualified person and meritocracy is what has been used to appoint the person. On a larger scale, if the new Constitution passes and I hope it does, we will be doing a lot of vetting. We should not start shooting ourselves in the feet by showing that we do selective vetting by coming up with recommendations that are not supported even in the body of our Report. With those few remarks, I beg to oppose."
}