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{
    "id": 555877,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/555877/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 279,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Ms.) Odhiambo-Mabona",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 376,
        "legal_name": "Millie Grace Akoth Odhiambo Mabona",
        "slug": "millie-odhiambo-mabona"
    },
    "content": "are married under customary law, once you get a certificate, it is proof enough. Now if you are going to court, whether it is for divorce or whatever reason, it is easier. Unfortunately, by way of regulation it is going against the very object for which this Marriage Act was passed, which was to make marriage, as an institution, easier for Kenyans. The regulations are making it more difficult for Kenyans. That is why I am very pleased with the Hon. Member for bringing this Motion which will make marrying easier. I am glad that what he is seeking to do is devolve the Office of the Marriage Registrar. I was just telling my dear sister, Hon. Joyce Lay, that we need to be very clear that what we are devolving is the office and not marriage. I do not want Mr. Mabona to be devolved to the counties. Having said that, and if we are clear that we are not devolving marriage but the office, I wish that the Member had concurrently also brought amendments to the Marriage Act. I want to confess that at the point that we were doing the Marriage Act, we were at the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) and so I was not able to push in my own amendment. One of the things that are of concern to me in the Marriage Act is the definition of “dowry”. The definition of dowry in the Act seems to suggest that women are for sale. As Hon. Millie Odhiambo-Mabona, I do not see dowry as sale price. I personally rejected the idea of anybody paying dowry for me because I am not worth any price. I am valueless before God and I do not want anybody purporting to pay any dowry for me. To make sure that the people who look at it from a cultural perspective and not from a commercial perspective understand, if you look at the way it is defined in the Act, it is actually a commercial venture. It takes a contract law perspective because it says: “Dowry is money or something else paid in consideration of---” “In consideration of” makes it a contractual thing. In a contract you have the buyer and the seller. They pay consideration for something. Those are some of the things that we need to amend. We also need to redefine the meaning of “monogamous marriage” under the Act. Inadvertently, this Act has excluded the bulk of Kenyans who are married under what we called before the “African Christian Marriage and Divorce Act.” They are excluded by definition. I do not want to read because of time. I want to give my colleagues a chance. I am sure we did not think through it very clearly but it has excluded people who choose to go through monogamous marriages directly. Those are not the only defects that I have noticed in this Act; a lot of them have to do with issues of definition. Some of them would just be to strengthen the Act in relation to, for instance, the issue of cohabitation because we are still not curing the challenges that most practitioners were facing. When you say cohabitation refers to people who have stayed together for a number of years, what is “a number of years”? Are two, 10 or 20 years a number of years? “A long time” is a very relative term. For me, if you are happily married then 10 years is like one day. However, if you have married a horror movie, then even one day is like a lifetime. We need to cure these ambiguities. I want to thank the Mover. It is a good first step but after six months, which I believe the Act has lasted, we need to look at amending both the Marriage Act and the Division of Matrimonial Property Act, not because they are bad but to make them better. There are one or two mistakes that we made here and there, and we can correct them. Both are good initiatives. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}