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"id": 294679,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/294679/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Kimunya",
"speaker_title": "The Minister for Finance",
"speaker": {
"id": 174,
"legal_name": "Amos Muhinga Kimunya",
"slug": "amos-kimunya"
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"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I have already taken sides and said that I am compelled to oppose this Bill. This is because when I look at the issues contained therein, I find that, perhaps, we are providing a very simplistic solution to a very complex problem. I also want to confirm to this House that as a Government and as the Ministry of Transport we have already looked at all these issues, consulted with all the stakeholders and have come up with a comprehensive Traffic (amendment) Bill which is only awaiting the disposal of this Bill, so that it can then be introduced into this House for a comprehensive debate by the Members of the House. When I looked at the possibilities we had of, perhaps, even taking over this Bill and merging the two, I found that it would be very unfortunate for me to try to superimpose a Bill of 40 plus pages on a four-page Bill; that would be an over-kill, and will not do justice to the debating that is required in this House. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if I was to look at specific sections that we are uncomfortable with, the very first one is obviously at the very beginning; this is the amendment proposed under Section 12. The hon. Member seems to have the impression that the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) is the registrar of motor vehicles. The KRA is set up by an Act of this House, and has been given specific mandate to collect revenues and not to register motor vehicles. It is only a matter of administrative convenience that they have actually been doing that; the Registrar of Motor Vehicles is an appointee of the Ministry of Transport and we have an office for him. Attempting now to even give the ownership of the vehicle identification number plates to the KRA, which is a revenue collector, and taking it from the Registrar of Motor Vehicles is a misguided proposal; I am not sure what the logic of it is. It goes further that even when you sell a vehicle you are supposed to surrender the numbers and then get new numbers. We will lose track of even the identity of the vehicle, yet the number is a unique identifier of a vehicle; so, you can trace its owner and everything else. We have already captured all that in our data bases. That is only one of the things that I have an issue with. When you look at the penalties proposed - Maj-Gen. Nkaissery just mentioned one of them - you are managing accidents, but an accident is an accident. It is called an accident because nobody intends it, neither the driver nor the victim. The circumstances will always be different. There are accidents where the driver is a 100 per cent contributor and there is a penalty for that. When you say that when one commits an accident he is subject to life imprisonment, you are basically even removing the discretion of the courts to assess the mitigating circumstances under which the accident occurs. We looked at that within our own Bill after consultation with all the stakeholders and agreeing; if you attribute the level of negligence to the different parties then the sentence should reflect the same, which is not the case in this Bill. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, when you look at Section 46, it is a typical example of that. When you also look at some of the other things the Member is trying to do in this Bill, you will recall that the late Michuki gazetted some rules in 2003, the so called “the Michuki Rules”. Those were in Legal Notice 161 of 3rd October 2003. They required that drivers must wear uniforms, a, b, c, d. The reason why they came through a Legal Notice was so that you could change them. If the uniform was blue and colour blue was not in production, what would you do? When you put it in the law that every driver must wear a blue uniform and the conductor must wear a maroon uniform and those colours are not in production, you are basically creating cartels and monopolies through an Act. You put it in regulations, so that the Minister can change the requirement as circumstances change. We deliberately kept all this in regulations. What the hon. Member is trying to do is to lift the entire Michuki Rules and put them within the Traffic Act. This now removes the discretion for altering those rules as circumstances change. It is the same thing with the rules we gazetted for boda bodas in 2009 through Legal Notice No.173 of 2009; they address the issue of helmets and all that for the boda bodas. Now, what the Member is trying to do is again pick those, which are already in the law, and purport them to be an amendment by him by changing Section 103(a). Now, there is a reason why Parliament legislates the way it does and says that this is substantive and we are going to put it in the main law; this is something that changes on a day to day basis, and we will give the discretion to the Minister to issue regulations as the circumstances change. If we change the architecture of drafting laws--- I am not convinced why it is happening. We will now be forced that every time there is a small change, we have to come to this Parliament and it takes a couple of months before a law is changed here. In the mean time, we will be holding people at ransom out there. You also look at some of the other things in terms of abolition of the Traffic Department. Yes, the Traffic Department may have had its challenges, but is abolishing it going to be the solution, or is the solution not reforming it within the comprehensive police reforms that we are undertaking and equipping it? What do you expect us to do when the police do not have motor cycles? Right now I can confirm to this House, and I know it is a fact, that there are over 250 motor cycles that have been bought for the Traffic Department. The riders are currently undergoing training, so that they can then be dispatched to our roads and towns to sort out some of the matters. I have requested the Commissioner of Police that of those 250 plus motor cycles, I would like to see half of them deployed within Nairobi; that should be about 100 of them. This should be done so that the issue of people overlapping in the morning or overtaking in the wrong place--- There should be a police motor cycle patrolling every road and it should be able to contain that situation. It is an administrative issue. Parliament has provided them with the resources and we will provide them with the legal framework. We brought to this Parliament a law that comprehensively addresses how we will set up a National Police Commission (NPC) which will be given the power to set up the various departments by the Constitution. We have done that already. We are only waiting for the appointment of the NPC. But we are now coming back again to say that since the Traffic Police have failed us in the past, we are passing another law to disband it. Why did we pass the first one and even put it in the Constitution that the police shall be managed and administered through the NPC? It does not quite make much sense to me that as a House, we seem to be shooting at both sides of the barrel by creating power and at the same time denying the NPC the power to reorganize itself and to respond to our issues. I believe that this raises a constitutional issue which we did not want to challenge at that point but it is up to this House to determine where we want to go. The bottom line is, when I look at this Bill, there are good proposals, but they are not unique to this Bill. These proposals are also contained in the Government Bill. I will be happy and I have also asked my people to look at the two. I had, in fact, proposed to the hon. Member that we harmonize the two, so that we have only one comprehensive Bill. However, I think the hon. Member was very keen to have his Bill published."
}