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{
"id": 47707,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/47707/?format=api",
"text_counter": 250,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Otieno",
"speaker_title": "The Minister of State for Public Service",
"speaker": null,
"content": "The Constitution provides that the commission will appoint a secretary, and that the secretary will be the Chief Executive Officer of the commission. What the Bill has done is that the secretary, as Chief Executive Officer of the Commission, will be the head of the secretariat by way of being the head of a professional management outfit of the Commission. If we allow the Commissioners to engage in the daily activities of the Commission, we run the risk that nobody will be held responsible for the administration of the day to day running of the Commission by the Commissioners. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the situation envisaged is a Commission which will issue regulations and approve systems, procedures, standards and set targets. It will be able to make the rules by which the professional management will have to run the Commission. Due to these rules, a professional secretariat will know how to account to the commission for what they do. They will, therefore, need to be preparing commission papers, which will be a record of every request to the Commission for approval to undertake every activity under the Commission. In the absence of such a system, we cannot guarantee the integrity and stability of every commission. We cannot guarantee transparency because if the Commissioners, as the current commission is known to be doing, are themselves executives and run elections, we will end up with nobody to supervise them. We now want a clearly delineated set of activities, so that the Commissioners will hold the secretariat accountable to the commission and then the commission, in turn, will be accountable to Parliament. Mr. Speaker, Sir, if you look at the challenges that we have in the management of our institutions, you will realise that one of them is the personality cult in our system. The personalities somehow manage to get more powerful than the institutions to which they have been appointed. This situation only arises when we do not have clear accountability guidelines. This Bill envisages that the Commissioners will hold the secretariat and management accountable. Another challenge is that when emotions run high in this country, logic fails lamentably. So, we need to have very clear guidelines as to who will be running what activities, and who will hold that person accountable. There must be very clear rules and guidelines to be followed. In case of any deviation, there should be documentation to explain exactly what happened and get the approval of the commission. If this is not done, we will end up with a situation, again, where those who make the mistakes in the management of our institutions will not be known, and they will be getting away with murder. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the other challenge, which we are surely aware of, is corruption. If you allow somebody to be a commissioner and, at the same time, be the one to manage the day to day operations of an institution, deals will be made and nobody will see through what goes on in such a commission. So, a clear separation of the duties of the Commission from those of the management is very important in our environment. This is a major change in the management of our institutions, particularly in the management of the ten independent constitutional commissions, which will get their budgetary allocations directly from Parliament. The rest will be undertaken by the Controller and Auditor-General, who will come in much later, after the resources have been spent."
}