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"id": 197228,
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"speaker_name": "Ms. A. Abdalla",
"speaker_title": "Nominated Member",
"speaker": {
"id": 382,
"legal_name": "Amina Ali Abdalla",
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"content": " Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me this opportunity to make my first speech in this Tenth Parliament. I wish to begin by thanking my party, KANU, for giving me this wonderful opportunity of becoming a professional Nominated Member of Parliament by nominating me for a second time. Secondly, I would like to thank the Principals for signing the Peace Agreement which has brought us this relative peace that we are enjoying. We, as Kenyans, have been net exporters of peace negotiators and relief workers throughout the region. So, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the African Continent, for once, for allowing us to import peace negotiators and relief workers to help us in this trying time. In that light, I would like to thank His Excellency Dr. Kofi Annan for spearheading and managing the peace negotiations. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we, as Members of Parliament, must be in the forefront speaking about peace at all levels. But to begin with this Parliament, I would like to urge Mr. Speaker and Mr. Deputy Speaker that some of the things that we propose like trips should not be allowed. For example, some Members of Parliament went to Rwanda last year to witness what happened during the genocide. It is clear that many of the constituents of the hon. Members who visited Rwanda actually suffered more chaos than those of hon. Members who did not go there. I would like to propose that, in this Parliament, instead of hon. Members visiting Rwanda, we should instead visit Tanzania, where hon. Members will not be asking me the difficult question: \"What is your tribe?\" and instead ask will me: \"What region do you come from?\" I, therefore, urge that we should not be going to study the negative. Instead, we should focus on studying the positive. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the shoe is now in a different foot. A lot of the laws that we refused to pass last year were not passed because we were thinking very myopically. We imagined we would be in the positions we were in at one particular time throughout. I would like to urge hon. Members that we stop looking at things depending on which side of the political divide we are in and instead look at how good legislation is to Kenyans. In the last Parliament, I was a Member of the Departmental Committee on Administration of Justice and Legal Affairs. Some of the proposals that we put forth to this House but were rejected, and even never saw the light of the day in the House Business Committee (HBC), would have saved us. The Constitutional amendments we are calling for were going to allow for a re-run of the presidential election, something that is not in our Constitution. The amendments were going to allow for an Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) that was more transparent and the vetting of public appointments, so that we stop having nepotism being the main criterion for making public appointments. Many hon. Members on both sides of this House declined to support the bringing of that legislation, because they thought we would never be in a position where they would need a 232 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES March 19, 2008 presidential election re-run. This Tenth Parliament, that we have called \"historic\", will only be historic if we make legislation that is in the interest of Kenyans, so that we get a situation in which whichever shoe you wear at a particular time, you will not be negatively affected. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other business that I would really urge hon. Members to work on is the fact that we always think of individuals when we are making legislation. Yesterday, there was a bad precedent, because we were really making bad law because we needed it politically. I hope that, that is not going to be what we are going to do for the rest of this Session of Parliament. People talk about reviewing and changing the ECK, but when we come to appointing the ECK commissioners, we are going to have people saying they want to have commissioners nominated by the ODM or PNU parties. These will be people who will not have been vetted by anybody. I would like us to be very critical of the legislation we bring to this House. It is not just enough that a commissioner must come from a party. We should be looking at meritocracy. The only way of doing that is to ensure that we put in place all the legislations that will contain a vetting mechanism that will ensure that if you are partyless, but you are qualified to exercise a function, you are given that responsibility rather than basing appointments on the strength of a nominee's political party in this House. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, on the issue of building institutions, one of the good pieces of legislation that was brought to the Ninth Parliament by our colleague, Mr. Oloo-Aringo, was the Fiscal Analysis and Appropriation Bill, which was going to strengthen Parliament in reviewing the Budget. The exercise of reviewing the Budget in this House is a ritual. It is like those prayers people say when they are singing. Nobody can make any change in the Budget that comes to this House, yet we saw the House Business Committee and the Minister for Finance refusing to have that legislation implemented. That is not the only legislation that strengthens institutions that did not get assented to. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, on the issue of the Political Parties Bill, who knows about the coalition agreement that was signed between the PNU and ODM(K)? Who is the custodian of that document? If the Political Parties Bill had been assented to, the Registrar of Political Parties would be the custodian of that document. If there is any dispute that is to arise, he or she would be the person to deal with it and send it to the Political Parties Disputes Tribunal (PPDT). It in that light that I would like to urge His Excellency the President that, because of the difficulties of ethnicity that we have, we need to strengthen political parties. He should immediately assent to the Political Parties Bill. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, His Excellency the President, in his Address, mentioned that we are going to have amendments to the Local Government Act in this House to enable the direct election of mayors and county council chairmen. The female hon. Members, who got nominated, have the IPPG hon. Members to thank for the review of Section 33 of this Constitution, which forced the political parties to ensure that 50 per cent of those nominated had to be women. This is not the case with the Local Authorities Act, which allows councils such as Mombasa, Garissa and others to have councils that do not have a single female nominated councillor. I will support that legislation the day it comes to this House. But I urge that we make an amendment to have it become gender-sensitive, so that we do not have scenarios where two men want to be mayor and deputy mayor. This process has to be gender-balanced. The nomination of councillors has also got to be balanced. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, His Excellency the President also spoke about the eradication of slums. As Kenyans, the best example of slum eradication, with a poverty alleviation component, was the project by the late Tom Mboya. He made sure that the houses that were built for eradicating slums were going to generate sufficient income in terms of sub-leasing, so that slum March 19, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 233 dwellers did not have to pay so much money that they were forced to come up with new slums. As we talk about the issue of slum eradication, let us not have projects like the Kibera Highrise, where it is the rich who benefited and not the people from Kibera. Let us not just pay lip service to this. When the housing policies come to this House and we talk about slum eradication, we must be very clear that the people in the slums cannot pay the Kshs13,000 that the National Housing Corporation (NHC) is asking them to pay per month. They cannot get that amount even if they leased out the entire house. What we are saying is that we will wait for a rich person to come, pay that person a little amount, who will then move out and start building some other slums. We must look at the issue of how we implement the policies that come to this House. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, in the last Parliament I brought a Motion on delegated legislation, which the previous Speaker promised would be in the new Standing Orders. I will be keenly asking for your support to ensure that the laws and policies we pass in this House are implemented to the letter and spirit. It should not be for Ministers to take legislation and interpret it as they wish. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, finally, I would like to mention the fact that we, as a nation, in the past, have been very good at signing international agreements that we have had no intention of domesticating. As we look at the many amendments we want to make to our Constitution, and the new laws that we will be bringing to this House, I would like to urge that we also include the mandatory domestication of any legislation that our Executive signs in the international arena. For example, I would want the UN Security Council Resolution No.1325, that deals with women and children in conflict, domesticated in this House, so that we do not see the things that we saw. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, with those many remarks, I beg to support."
}