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{
    "id": 1224607,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1224607/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 403,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Cheruiyot",
    "speaker_title": "The Senate Majority Leader",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13165,
        "legal_name": "Aaron Kipkirui Cheruiyot",
        "slug": "aaron-cheruiyot"
    },
    "content": " Mr. Speaker, Sir, thank you for this chance. I beg to second this Bill that has been brought to us by Sen. Mungatana, a man that is among the many that inspired me to love the work of Parliament. I watched him back then as a university student every afternoon as I engaged. That was in the 10th Parliament. He is one of those people I used to enjoy following their contributions in the House because of the kind of things he was saying. There and then, I fell in love with Parliament and hoped that one day, God would grant me the chance to be in this House. A few years down the line, I had the chance. As fate will have it, we have finally been teamed up together in one team and doing our duty here in the Senate. Sen. Mungatana, MGH, has proposed to this House a very interesting Bill. It is titled: ‘The Preservation of Human Dignity and Enforcement of Economic and Social Rights Bill, 2022’, is quite a mouthful. When you think through and imagine everything that he tries to do in one particular Bill, for sure, it will be quite a humongous task. Yet, it is a duty, as he has properly espoused in his moving notes that we must live up to. We must uphold economic and social rights as provided for in our Constitution. Kenyans in 2010 did not pass this Constitution without due consideration and thinking through that which they intended to achieve in every single Article. If you remember that campaign, there was a strong, vigorous and long debate about the Constitution. There are those who supported it and there are those who opposed it. That afforded the country the chance to look through this Constitution, clause by clause and article by article, to the last. There is none that was left behind. Many of the people at the time followed the debate in the radio and television stations. If there was a time where public participation has been properly done, then it was with our Constitution. I remember at that time there were civil society groups that moved from village to village, educating people and calling public barazas and informing people. However, many politicians were quoting non-existent clauses in the Constitution. When members of the public went to these barazas, it was not unusual for them to rise up and ask questions. They would ask whether it was true that we were allowing men to marry each other; and they would be taken through the Constitution, clause by clause. They would be told that the only marriage recognized by this Constitution is the one between those of the opposite gender. People would then sit down and agree that if that was case then it was correct. The same can be said about our social and economic rights. There was a long debate about it. There was a debate about what form of government we were proposing; was it socialism? There had been the conversation about Majimboism in the 2005 infamous Kilifi Draft. There were persons who informed the members of the public and said that upon the passage of that Constitution, if you have 100 acres of land and your neighbour has five, it would be put together and shared equally amongst them. They would then go down to the Constitution and look at a particular clause. That afforded people the opportunity to read through the Bill of Rights. The economic rights to own property. Somebody knew that the property they had nobody would touch it on"
}