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{
    "id": 1112812,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1112812/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 298,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Orengo",
    "speaker_title": "The Senate Minority Leader",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 129,
        "legal_name": "Aggrey James Orengo",
        "slug": "james-orengo"
    },
    "content": "and Mr. Pheroze Norjee stood for me. Sen. Wako will tell you that I had about five sedition cases which were unresolved. In fact, those files are still alive because those cases were not terminated. When somebody says that you have in your possession seditious documents and on that account, they come to search your house, that type of provision is not good in our type of democracy. When crime is being fought in the United States of America (USA), the people around President Trump at that time, the most powerful person in the world at the time, could not help the people who were around him; most of them ended up in jail. That is when you know that the law is being applied by people of integrity and offices that are truly independent. The cases that Sen. Wetangula has provided here like in Korea, part of it is because they had people of integrity and they did not start with the small people. They started with the big people; presidents and ministers went to jail. In Kenya, the type of laws that we have like the Anti-Corruption and Community Crimes Act, it basically targets people who are powerless who are taken to court to fight political battles. If we did not have the kind of Bill of Rights that we have in Kenya today, a lot of those people would be suffering. A lot of those cases are not even seeing the light of day. I am not criticizing this Bill from the point of view that I do not support it but I am saying that anything that goes against the Bill of Rights should never be supported. We should never support anything that goes before the Bill of rights. The English say that, “My house is my castle.” That is a statement that is normally made in the courts that for anybody to come to your house to conduct a search, there must be very good reasons. The provisions in Clause 8 in so far as searches are concerned, we are weaponing the law enforcement agencies that even in the mildest of cases; when they do not have exceptional reasons, they may be groping in the dark. They sometimes have no basis but willy-nilly, they come to your house and find something which you can probably give a justification but by the time you do it, you will have already suffered. Your family is also made to suffer in the process. Madam Temporary Speaker, in terms of the warrants and the searches as well as the freezing of accounts, we should be very careful. Otherwise, I support this Bill because without lifestyle audits of public officers, dealing with corruption is going to continue to be very difficult because the laws that relate to corruption offences are very difficult sometimes to be proved in a criminal court. If you can obviously see that somebody has assets that cannot be explained, then they need to be audited. In Kenya today, you can have an officer with myriad homes yet he or she has never done any other job in his or her life. If you compare them to people who do proper business such as those who head multinationals--- compared how much the public officer has made in 10 or 20 years, to somebody in the corporate world who has a job at the highest level. If you look at the salary of the person at the multinational compared to that of a public officer, it is worlds apart yet the public officer can have several homes, farms all over of over 20,000 acres, some of which is bought cash. Some officers have personal fleet of aircraft. That kind of wealth at the hands of a public officer must be explained unless there is justification. If that is not done, fighting corruption will be very difficult. It will be like going after a snake which has already bitten somebody and that bite is fatal."
}