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{
    "id": 1211235,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1211235/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 232,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Embakasi West, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Mark Mwenje",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1429,
        "legal_name": "George Theuri",
        "slug": "george-theuri"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker for that introduction. Having listened to my colleagues, I gather the question is about having a presidential or parliamentary system of government. That is the debate we are having with this memorandum from the President. I believe we do have issues with the 10 years of this presidential system. It has not achieved what we set out to do. There are some positives and there are a few issues too that remain unresolved, especially the issue of bringing Cabinet Secretaries to the Floor of the House. Some of us, growing up, had the privilege of watching how Parliament operated. We watched Cabinet Secretaries respond to Questions in the House. We borrowed that system from the British and it appears to be a favourable one. It is more at home with the people of Kenya. Since I joined the House, I have done a bit of research and realised that a Question can take up to six months by the time it goes to the relevant Committee and before you get a response. We are here for five years. If you break that down it means if you were to follow up on the same Question it would take you a year before the Question is responded to. For that reason, we should limit the number of Questions that we ask. If it will take you six months to get a response yet we only have five years here, then there is something wrong with our system. I do not believe these challenges existed in the previous system, but here we are. We now find ourselves with a system that we must improve. I believe deciding to throw the whole system away will be more difficult and it will take a longer process. I was elected under the Azimio Coalition. Some of us contributed to the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) and did quite a lot. I find it strange, Hon. Temporary Speaker, because some of us were supporting this idea. We had a presidential candidate, Hon. Raila Amollo Odinga, with whom I had the privilege of discussing this issue. He is on record for saying that he enjoyed being questioned when he was serving as Prime Minister. We do not want to water down the integrity of the committees, but clearly it cannot be business as usual the way it has happened for the last 10 years. I listened to my senior, Hon. T.J Kajwang’, talking about the privilege of this provision and I agree with him 100 per cent. If it means locking the Cabinet Secretaries in a corner over there to answer our Questions or if that is what it takes to find a hybrid system, so be it. I, however, feel we will not be losing much if we got the Cabinet Secretaries here to directly respond to issues that affect our constituents. This is something that the 12th Parliament was trying to bring back and it has been brought back. On the matter of the office of the Leader of Opposition, we really voted for it under BBI and some of us hoped that it would come back. Let us be honest and call a spade a spade. Those who opposed it have now brought it back. Those of us who supported BBI now want to oppose it because it is being brought by those who opposed it. At what point does this cycle come to an end? We wanted this proposal. I remember the President himself, at Bomas of Kenya, asking us, ‘Now you have created the position of Leader of Opposition, what about these others who are here?’ He referred to Kalonzo, Wetangula, and Mudavadi. We remained quiet because we figured out that it was actually true. We had not considered them. We are now looking at one position. We must do that beyond any individual, but right now the perfect person to take the position is Hon. Raila Amollo Odinga. We are not creating the position for him. In fact, initially, we thought the position would go to the current President. We were out there shouting that he is the one who is going to 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."
}