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"speaker_name": "Mr. Wetangula",
"speaker_title": "The Minister for Trade",
"speaker": {
"id": 210,
"legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
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"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, thank you for according me an opportunity to contribute to this Bill. This Bill is important, is long overdue and comes at a time when we need to realign, streamline and regulate the training and provision of one of the most critical professions in this country. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I hope that by the passage of this Bill, other critical professions will follow suit and streamline the training and admission of members of the academia into their professions. We have seen, over a period, the dilution of professionalism in this country. This is, perhaps, because of the pressure from the overwhelming population, the demand or the desire to have so many people joining choice professions. However, I think something that the Bill must address is also the commercialization of professional training in this country. When the University of Nairobi had the only Faculty of Law providing training of lawyers and the Kenya School of Law was the only post-graduate entry, we had very stringent provisions and requirements. For you to join the Faculty of Law the threshold was very high. You will find that for those who went to the university up to about ten years ago, if not 15 years ago, the threshold was different from what you find today. Then there came a monster called “a parallel programme” at the universities. In this monster, you even have seen police constables going to the university and emerging as lawyers without any attendant background qualifications, because they are able to pay fees. You have seen all manner of people; thank God they are lawyers! Imagine if the same was happening with doctors who are dealing with people’s lives! Imagine if the same was happening with engineers who design structures that can collapse on people! You join the profession simply because you have a wallet and you can pay for it. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, every so often you have seen a building collapsing because the structural engineer was a quack! If you practice law in this country, you will see how many clients are led to disaster by ill trained lawyers; lawyers who can hardly defend their clients even after being hired to do so. There are lawyers who cannot even speak the medium of communication of lawyers; the English language and yet they carry their degrees through parallel programmes, they carry certificates from the School of Law through payment of fees and the School of Law previously has not been empowered legally to pick and choose who should join. Those who have graduated from the university, regardless of their performance, join the School of Law. That is why I laud this Bill, but we must have standard criteria so that even if you pick your degree through a parallel system, the School of Law has a choice to disallow your entry if you did not qualify in the first place to become a lawyer. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, it is this same crop of lawyers who end up being judges and if you are ill trained from what we call in law ab initio, it is unlikely that along the way you will pick sufficient knowledge to be a good judge. So I want to urge that we pass this Bill to empower the School of Law as the premier post-graduate training for lawyers to go back to where we were; teaching lawyers etiquette. Teaching them how a lawyer should conduct him or herself in front of her clients or in front of the courts. In the good old days, lawyers used to walk on the corridors with their hands at the back going to defend their clients. These days you go to a court and you cannot tell the difference between a criminal suspect and his lawyer. It is disastrous! You find complaints to the authorities about lawyers who pick money from their clients and never turn up in court. This is lack of etiquette and I am sure there are many hon. Members here who have suffered at the hands of ill trained lawyers. That is why we need this law. That is why we need to streamline the professionalism that we expect of lawyers. In the old days when you were buying a property, a letter called undertaking from a lawyer to a bank or a seller was enough to hand over the property to you even if it was going to cost Kshs20 million because the word of the lawyer was respected. These days, a letter from a lawyer undertaking that he will pay after the transaction is just a piece of paper in some respects. We have seen, contrary to what we expect in this noble profession, some law firms are demanding that when another lawyer gives an undertaking, it must be accompanied by a bank guarantee. You can imagine what we have reduced our profession to; that I am giving you undertaking that you pass over the documents, we transfer this property and you will get the money at the end and you write back and say: “Give me a bank guarantee before I take your letter.” This never happened in this profession and I hope that the good old days of Tudor Jackson when he used to spent time telling us what a good lawyer is; a good lawyer is not one who knows how to recite the law everywhere off head but it is one who knows where to find the law and the law is in the books. A good lawyer is one whose word is sacrosanct. It is one whose word is only as good as when a doctor tells you: “Go, you are healed.” That is a good lawyer. A good lawyer; when he tells you: “This is my considered opinion on this matter.” You go away feeling you have been properly advised. But these days, you give a considered opinion and the client just walks into the next office to seek an opinion on your opinion because of ill training. Let me finish by urging that our colleagues who head Ministries that deal with professions--- I was very impressed when Mr. Obure brought here a Bill to deal with errant engineers and contractors. We passed a very good law. I hope it will be applied correctly, so that we do not have quacks masquerading as professionals. I want to urge the Ministers responsible for the medical profession also to bring similar Bills here to streamline the etiquette, conduct and professionalism of those professionals."
}