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"id": 52332,
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"speaker_name": "Ms. Karua",
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"legal_name": "Martha Wangari Karua",
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"content": "I want to mourn the fact that the Minister has brought only this Bill. The electoral laws should have come as a package, not just the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission law, but we are able to see the new electoral law and any other law that is related. But all is not lost; it ought to come in quick succession. We need to start asking ourselves; what is new in this Bill that was not in our earlier Bills? We had no Electoral Commission Bill, if I can remember because it was just coming from the Constitution. But what is new in this Bill, which we did not practice before? Having gone through it, the only new thing in this Bill is the mode of the appointment of the Commissioners. I want, therefore, to stand here and say: This Bill is totally inadequate. It is a good effort, Mr. Minister, but is inadequate. It is up to this House to now take it up and make it adequate. What is the matter with our electoral laws? We have seen the post- Kivuitu period, where we have had by-elections. We have had so many complaints in the by- elections. I, for one, as a party leader, wrote to the Electoral Commission just after the concluded by-election. The lessons learnt were that it does not matter the name of the Commissioner, it does not matter the names of the Clerks, and human beings can always abuse the space they have if the systems are not water tight. If we do not scrutinize this law, we shall be the first casualties of this law. I think that one thing we need to do is to ensure that personal responsibility is assigned to every person in the electoral chain from the Chairman of the Commission, commissioners, to the secretary who will be the Chief Executive Officer, to the clerk, to the messenger and to the driver and to anybody, who collaborates and works with the Commission. If we do not assign that, we are not moving far from the last situation. What motivates an officer to give indelible ink to one of the contestants, so that they pre-mark the fingers of people to disable them from voting? What will make an officer when counting to try to crook figures for one party? Obviously, they will have been induced by one of the participants. If we do not assign serious responsibility, and criminal responsibility for wrong doing on the individual and not on a body called the Commission, so that anybody who knowingly abuses the position they hold, be it a police officer, who is guarding a polling centre, who is deemed at that time to be under the Commission, be a it a clerk or anybody else in the chain, they must face very severe penalties. One of the things that we really must introduce at the Committee Stage is that anybody or any officer of the Commission, who knowingly flouts the electoral code; whether it is in the matter of delineating boundaries, which is a very serious issue, whether it is in the matter of elections, anybody who knowingly, flouts the Constitution, the rules and code should not only have very severe, criminal consequences, they should also be barred from holding any public office for a decade. That will make a person think twice before they agree to be recruited by any person. Even the laws we had, nothing was wrong with them. What is actually wrong is that we, as human beings, have become sophisticated in our methods of committing crime. So, we are looking for laws that will keep up with the sophisticated mind of the offender. That is why instead of answering, a Commissioner tells you; I have no role in this, it is the Returning Officer. The Returning Officer tells you; it is the Commission, and sometimes, a Returning Officer tells you the devil made me do it. Together with such a devil, such an officer should go to jail for the longest period to ensure that no other devil or officer ever does such an offence again. You can see the chaos that attended the end of the elections in 2007 in this country. The laws of credibility for the electoral process--- We need to take very drastic measures to be able to restore confidence. I went through some of the legislation from fellow African countries, and in particular, the Ghanian legislation. I cannot quite remember, whether it was a Bill like this one setting up the Commission or it is the electoral law. They have the good sense of assigning responsibility on the individual and severe penalties. I would want our penalties to be more severe than theirs. That is why I am suggesting, apart from a jail term, fine or both, one should be barred from holding any public office, so that if you are hired by the Commission, your spouse and children will be telling you; please, do not put us off food, for the next decade. Please, act well; otherwise, you are going to affect us. It will weigh on your mind. Nobody will seek a job in the Commission for purposes of rein-seeking and messing the country. Similar penalties should attach to the participants, who are people like us in the electoral laws. We should have a proper resolution mechanism. My colleague, hon. Orengo alluded to it. We spent a night at the KICC trying to do a retallying, looking at the files, not a retally really, but verifying the figures in the files. I want to say here for all your ears, I wish my colleague was seated here; we found nothing wrong in them, except one, where the votes for Chepalungu were exaggerated in typing, but there was another paper written properly. We concluded that it was an error. It was 400,000 votes instead of forty something. I could have stood out and said; these people were rigging by 350,000. Unfortunately, that is not what everybody else did. So, what we are saying is this: Could we have processes that would lead us to the answers that we are seeking? We do not have to fight. Why I am saying it is a package is that if the electoral law was here, I would be seeking to see whether everything about disputes resolution mechanism is there."
}