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"content": "that law is not tabled on the Floor of the House within 21 days, then it could stand to be void, meaning that it could be annulled. That has yet to happen in the history of Kenya. We believe that the designers just cut and pasted the British law onto our laws. They did not make provisions under which the tabling would take place or develop the culture of tabling delegated legislations in Parliament. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the loopholes and other challenges that we have seen in the law include the fact that last year alone, there were over 200 delegated legislations that were produced, but only three were tabled in the House. In the process, a lot of delegated legislations are now subjects of court proceedings. They were, in essence, not valid laws because they were not tabled and debated in the House. An example is the Alco-blow regulations that were promulgated by the late hon. Michuki, when he was the Minister for Transport and the regulations on the age limit of cars allowed into the country, which was a subject of abuse of office; allegations made against hon. Henry Kosgey. These are some of the challenges. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the second loophole that we have noticed is that delegated legislations have been abused as a mechanism to provide for corruption loopholes. You make an ambiguous delegated legislation to expand the sphere of your powers and in the process be able to make financial gains out of it. So, this has been a major problem. We, as a committee, were bogged down in that, first, we did not have the powers to force Ministers to table delegated legislations. There was no penalty for them if they did not table the legislations. Secondly, even for the few delegated legislations that were tabled, we were being bogged down by complaints about non compliance with their contents. An example is the case where a delegated legislation was published by the Ministry of Energy to enable the National Oil Corporation (NOC) import 30 per cent of the country’s fuel requirements. Stakeholders in the petroleum sector complained about the content of that legislation, following its publication in the Kenya Gazette. If conditions for tabling delegated legislations were in place, we would have questioned the Ministry’s failure to consult the stakeholders, et cetera . Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we also dealt with the issue of the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) hiking their statutory deductions without consulting the stakeholders in the sector. So, as I mentioned before, due to ambiguity on the requirement to have delegated legislation tabled in the House, we do not have powers, as a House, to force Ministers to table the same. There are also no penalties provided for those who fail to table the legislation. Of course, we also know that in having this new legislation, we will have to strengthen the Standing Orders and the mandate of the committee as stipulated in the Standing Orders. Having looked at the existing challenges, we came up with this Bill, whose overall objective is to provide for a new and comprehensive regime for making publication, operationalisation and scrutinisation of statutory instruments in the country. The Bill proposes the repeal of Sections 27 and 34 of the Interpretation and General Provisions Act, Laws of Kenya, which I previously mentioned as being part of the problematic areas. Part I of the Bill provides for the Short Title, which is Standard. Part II provides for consultations, which shall be undertaken before making statutory instruments. We"
}