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{
    "id": 307144,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/307144/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 187,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Mr. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "The Minister for Trade",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": " Mr. Speaker, Sir, I support the Bill and I will be very brief. I want to urge the Minister, when it comes to the Committee Stage to simplify the manner in which petitions are presented. Persons who bring petitions to the House are groups of people, or individuals, who ordinarily either are unable to come to the House or do not have a Member who represents them to bring an issue to the House. Sometimes, they even look for an hon. Member who does not even represent them in their jurisdiction. I want to urge that, as Mr. Langat said, we should have a special office for receiving petitions. Once petitions are received, there is no need to hand them over to any hon. Member to present them to the House. Once they are received, they should be deemed to have been presented and the Office of the Clerk and the Office of the Speaker should find a way of getting them to the Floor, so that the House can know that a petition has been presented. Mr. Speaker, Sir, with the development of easy communication, I do not think that it should be hard and fast in the law that a petition must be physically presented to Parliament. Members of a community sitting in the Ilemi Triangle up north Kenya can mail their petition to Parliament. Once the petitions come in by mail, they should be received and acknowledged as if they were hand delivered and be processed like any other mail. Mr. Speaker, Sir, once the judicial commission receives it, it does not matter whether it was hand delivered. It should be processed like any other petition. This afternoon, I heard on radio that the Chief Justice has announced that members of the public can file court documents through email. If they can do that, I do not see why Parliament should not follow suit and receive petitions through emails and other modern ways of communication. That way, we can ease the pressure on the public to come and picket at the gate or waylay any hon. Member, especially those prone to playing to the gallery, to hijack petitions at the gate and come to present them to the House. Finally, I want to urge that once petitions are received, it should not be just statistic that the Office of the Clerk will keep a record. I want to urge the Minister at Committee Stage to bring an amendment so that within 30 days of the receipt of the petition, the petitioners should be made to know, in some way, the fate of their petition; whether it has been passed on to the relevant department, whether the Office of Mr. Speaker and the Clerk is able to deal with it or whether any other authority can deal with it, so that we do not pile petitions and at the end of the year, say we received 100 petitions and did nothing about them. That is the only way we can make and give meaning to this wonderful legislation that will give the voiceless an opportunity to present their grievances to this House. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}