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{
    "id": 1157908,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1157908/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 288,
    "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": "accountable. We are now making the presiding officer accountable. If you sue, it means you are going to include the pressing officer in the suit. That will bring in a lot of work. The IEBC did not think through clearly on this one. Our Departmental Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs (JLAC) did not think through what it is and yet, we have a lot of election practitioners there, including my good friends Hon. Kaluma and T.J. Kajwang’. They understand this very well. This will increase the number of people you will sue because the returning officer is one of the determinants. Suppose the retuning officer wires the wrong information. Bearing in mind the magnitude of an election, if we have several errors planned in many polling stations across the country, even the Supreme Court will have difficulties determining who won the election. That is a recipe for chaos. During the Committee of the whole House, we must clean up this law. We must be practical and systematic so that we do not end up with a law that is impossible to implement. We have only 120 days to the next general elections to be held on 9th August. This could give us a challenge. Proper justification was not given by the IEBC. I am one of the MPs who want the IEBC to function well by being practical and useful to this country. That is because it is important to our election process. The presidential results and the county results will be affected. Last time, we had a number of election petitions for governors, and they were contentious. Some of them went up to the Supreme Court. In the case of Machakos County gubernatorial election petition, the High Court approved it, but the Court of Appeal overturned it. When it went to the Supreme Court, it was reverted to the former position of the High Court. You can see that the problem was the collection of data and what happens at polling stations. In fact, there were extra polling stations which had not been gazetted and they did not belong to the IEBC. That is why the results ended up that way. Opening of the ballot boxes became a challenge. They had already been interfered with during their storage. I believe this is the process that the IEBC is trying to cure. The IEBC has participated in all the election petitions and it is aware of what happened. It is difficult to find out what mischief we are trying to cure though this law. Will it just be a law that the IEBC will say they amended an Act of Parliament after 10 years? During the Committee of the whole House, we have to really scrutinise this Bill. We have good lawyers in this House. We should give the country a good law so that when the best candidate wins, the rest will be satisfied. I support. Thank you."
}