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{
    "id": 1047864,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1047864/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 48,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nakuru Town East, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. David Gikaria",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2489,
        "legal_name": "David Gikaria",
        "slug": "david-gikaria"
    },
    "content": "heard Nandi County has gone to court trying to seek a directive on the manner in which they are going to approve the Bill that has been sent to them. Even if the judge was to make a judgement, what would they be referring to without a referendum law? I think this is a very good law that is going to address so many other issues. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, you remember yesterday or the other day some people in one of the counties that rejected the BBI had gone back to court to question some of the issues that are now being clarified in this Bill. I think once this Bill is approved, it is going to help sort out many issues that are being asked. When we will be given an opportunity, we will propose some amendments to the committees so that they can look at them. Some of the issues relate to even the definition of some of the terms used in this Bill. I will start by saying that if you look at the conduct of the referendum, it is very clear in our Constitution on how we can go about the parliamentary initiative and, of course, the popular initiative or what we have now. The collection of one million signatures… I do not want to belabour the issues that have been raised on the process of verification of the signatures, but it is important for the Committee to start also thinking of, as we look at the ways of verifying the signatures, the IEBC as a commission and what it must do through this Bill. It should indicate what time they should verify signatures. We cannot just give the Commission the task of verifying signatures and then they decide to take, for example, a year. So, again, in this Bill, the Committee needs to look into the timeframes that will be set for verification of signatures so that, again, it is not at the discretion of the IEBC to do that. Let me move to the other bit of the proposal here in the Bill that counties have been given 90 days to process the Bill. Even here in Parliament, when we are given a certain Motion or any Bill, it does not take more than three hours for us to debate it. It has not been specified how long the National Assembly should take to pass this kind of a Bill. With only three hours for debate of a certain Bill, then 90 days is just too much. We passed some procedural Motions today, but we can only speak for 10 minutes. I think the 90 days that have been given to counties or even to Parliament as indicated in the Bill are too many. Ninety days is such a long period. I think the Committee needs to look at this. They should give 30 or 45 days. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, on matters to do with public participation, I think there was a proposed Bill on public participation before Parliament. It is important that public participation should not just be public participation. I will get my supporters to come and say something and that is it. As Parliament, I think we need to fast-track that Bill on public participation so that we have a procedure for actual public participation. For example, in Nakuru, they put an advert in the newspapers to notify people of public participation. I think the Speaker of Nakuru County Assembly erred by allowing all the 11 sub-counties to do public participation. If we subject a Bill like this to 290 constituencies, then we will take forever. So, I think we also need that specification on public participation."
}