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{
    "id": 1265687,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1265687/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 242,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Westlands, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Tim Wanyonyi",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker, for giving me an opportunity also to contribute on this. I am a lawyer and, in our statutes, there are so many archaic laws that were passed by the colonialist just to suit their interests. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, the law that was used by the President to declare curfews was a very old law that might have been passed in 1929 or something like that. The law was used to impose curfews in the country. There are many other things like vagabonds whereby if you are found roaming in town and you do not have money in your pocket, you can be arrested. There is something called, “loitering with intent.” I do not know how they used to know that a person who was walking around town had intention to do something that was not right. This amendment is quite timely and we need to clean them up in our Penal Code and some other statutes that are still in existence that have been overtaken by time. We should come up with laws that do not abuse the rights of our people. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I represent an urban constituency and when you go to Industrial Area, you find that people are arrested for crimes that do not even exist. You find them there rotting away. They cannot even pay those small fines. This is great injustice. We just need to find out how we can decongest our prisons by removing some of these laws. Some of these things can even be dealt with at the communal work level. People can be given communal work and left to go home instead of going to prison. So, this is a good amendment and we need to support it, and then find a way of looking more in our statutes to remove these archaic laws that are used to frustrate and molest people. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I was in South Africa and I went to Soweto. In Soweto, when the apartheid regime was removing soil from the mines, they put a heap of soil to prevent people from looking at the city. Looking at the city was even criminal. You can imagine you are in your own country and you cannot go to Johannesburg from Soweto because they imagined that black people were criminals by nature. You were born a criminal. Everywhere you appear, you are a suspect. So, these are some of the things and the mindset of racists that colonialists had to use these laws to frustrate Africans. If you look at the Chiefs Act, it is the one that they used to detain people and some of the sections were not found anywhere. There was a time Hon. Lotodo was arrested for something called war-like activities. If you search that law in our statutes, it does not exist, but he was arrested and detained for that. He was the only person who has ever been detained for that kind of crime. It is something that we can do. We must look at how to clean up our statutes. Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker for giving me the chance and I thank Hon. Gikaria for bringing this amendment. We need to do even more so that we can clean up our statutes."
}