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{
    "id": 650940,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/650940/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 234,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Political parties are public institutions. If they have to benefit from public resources, they must be parties that transcend beyond regions, ethnicity and individuals. That is why we said that whereas we allow the registrar of political parties to register political parties as long as they meet those requirements, the threshold for them to be funded through public coffers must be higher than the threshold to register them. For your political party to benefit from public resources, it must have achieved a certain level of following and support across the country. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I agree that for a political party to benefit from public resources, it must have 20 Members of the National Assembly. That makes sense because it transcends beyond a region or an ethnic community. A political party must have also obtained at least three elected Senators, three elected governors and 40 MCAs. It is important to note that here we are talking about conjunctive. It must be 20 Members of the National Assembly, three Senators, three governors and 40 MCAs. By the time a political party succeeds to win this number of seats, it is a party that merits support and funding from the national coffers. That is very important for us to ensure that we have political parties that represent or transcend across the country. We must develop our political parties and drive them towards the direction of ideology. We have several political parties in this country. If you look at the existing political formations in this country, we have URP, my party, TNA who are our partners, Wiper, ODM, FORD-Kenya, UDF and many others. However, if you were to ask for the distinction between those parties, most likely you will narrow down to the party leaders and the regions where they have strong following. We must move our parties from such identities to ideological, so that we can say that this party stands for “x”, “y” or “z”, while the other stands for a different ideal. It is only then that we can have political parties that can help this country move forward. That is why this amendment is very important. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I agree with Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale that we need to move away from coalitions to big and major political parties. Whereas the concept of coalitions is important, we need to ask ourselves the tough questions. It is possible to have five, six or seven small parties forming coalitions. However, it is important that we start thinking along the lines of progressing. In future, we should have the ideal situation of three or four major political formations in this country. Kenyans can then be treated to two or three political ideologies that can help this country move forward. I thank the Senate for being consistent every time that the Members of the National Assembly treat us to some of these theatrics even in the process of passing Bills. I was told that the other day during the discussions of the monies allocated towards monitoring and evolution for the Senate, there were very juvenile debates in the National Assembly. I hope that individuals manning institutions like the Senate and the National Assembly will appreciate these two Houses of Parliament are Houses of honour. We can disagree respectfully. We can hold different views, but we must respect the integrity---"
}