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{
    "id": 35376,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/35376/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 391,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Mr. Kimunya",
    "speaker_title": "The Minister for Transport",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 174,
        "legal_name": "Amos Muhinga Kimunya",
        "slug": "amos-kimunya"
    },
    "content": "To wind up, and hopefully, hon. Shakeel may have an opportunity, I would like to mention something that was raised by hon. Mbadi. This is about coalitions and whether we should have coalitions or not. At this point in time, we have 50 plus political parties. The quickest route towards the mergers and bringing the parties towards three, four or five parties will be first of all through the coalitions, so that they can start working together and see that they have some commonality. Hopefully, those coalitions will then lead to full time mergers. That is the only way we are going to have few political parties. In any case, our Constitution guarantees the freedom of association not just for individuals, but even for political parties. But parties that obviously have some commonality in terms of ideas should be allowed to merge and form their coalitions at whatever point in time. The important thing, and this is where the issue of coalitions before an election becomes important, is the issue that was raised here by hon. Wetangula and others as to how you share out money for parties in a coalition. If you do not have that coalition properly structured and registered before the election, you will end up with the kind of situations where you hear people saying: “We were short-changed; we thought we brought more votes”. But that needs to be anchored properly within an agreement and deposited to the Registrar. People know that in a coalition, the votes that come to that coalition can be the basis of even the distribution of the funding, seats and nominations. That is why it is important that we capture some of these things. I could go on and on because this is a very interesting Bill, but I hope that we take it that this is one opportunity we have as Parliament to shape the political destiny of this country and to align our political systems with our national Vision 2030, which I would like to encourage the Members who have not looked at it, especially the political pillar, to look at it. All the things that we are doing are about creating our political system that will be issue-driven and people-driven to help our people have a higher quality of life by the year 2030. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}