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{
    "id": 1045675,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1045675/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 138,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Makueni, WDM-K",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Daniel Maanzo",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2197,
        "legal_name": "Daniel Kitonga Maanzo",
        "slug": "daniel-kitonga-maanzo"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Speaker, for giving me this opportunity to support this very important law. I want to agree with you that a referendum can be of many forms. In the proposed Clause 7, there are other forms of referenda other than the amendment of the Constitution. This is also a very important law bearing in mind that it is referring a lot to the Election Act such that whatever is not covered here is under that election law. While the Chair was moving, he talked about petitions or questions to be raised. These particular petitions originate from the High Court and can go to the Court of Appeal, but they do not find their way to the Supreme Court. This is for the simple reason that the current Constitution is supreme and is not one of the proposals in the current Building Bridges Initiative (BBI). The Supreme Court has a specific mandate to deal with presidential elections. Since referendum law is not captured by the current Constitution, then you cannot make use of the Supreme Court for purposes of a petition dealing with referenda although the magnitude of a referenda is equivalent to a presidential election and it is probably something to think of in future. Clearly, at the Third Reading, we have a lot of amendments to make to this law in order to make it better. You can see gaps from one point to another. For example, on the issue I am talking about of an election petition relating to a referendum, which has a magnitude equivalent to a presidential election, you can see that the timelines are very big in the referendum issue. I believe that whatever matter is taken to a referendum, Kenyans want to sort it out quickly so that they can go back to their normal lives. This is because whether the referendum is on the amendment of the Constitution or dealing with a matter Kenyans want to decide on, Kenyans want to finish with it. For example, when we formed and joined the East Africa Community (EAC), there was no referendum to that effect. If we are going to move out of the EAC, are we going to have a referendum because we never did it in the first place? We need to amalgamate a lot of things so that we can have a schedule of things which can go to a referendum because a lot of matters are The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}