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"id": 655191,
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"content": "Kshs25.3 billion that has gone to that county from the national kitty has been spent. We need to make up our minds. This is not just limited to Kakamega, but across the country. Today, I have been looking at the accounts of Kiambu County with my fellow Committee Members. There is no mention of purchase of motor vehicles for ward administrators. In that audit query of Kiambu, they do not mention how those vehicles were procured, how the decision was made or whether there was a county tender committee. Instead, they are telling us that daily balancing of cash books or monthly reconciliations were not done. These are petty things that I do not want to listen to when I am pursuing the monster called corruption. This Constitution which we want to perfect reduced the powers of the President to commissions. Every day, President Uhuru is busy, through the National Assembly, attempting to recapture the powers of commissions to an extent that he literally controls those commissions. Take the office of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), for example. Shame on them! They were told by the Jubilee Coalition to announce in advance that the people who signed the Okoa Kenya signatures did have authentic signatures. So, they threw away our initiative. Unless you have not gone to school, you know very well that the only institution in this country that has a repository of Kenyans’ signatures are banks. Banks do not care about the kind of signatures people give, but they insist on an authentic signature. How could IEBC commissioners pretend that under this Constitution they are supposed to verify the authenticity of a petitioner’s signature? They do not have that mandate under the Constitution. What is worse, the IEBC does not have a depository of our signatures. Sen. Wamatangi, you have been a voter for many years. You are now a Senator who controls policy, but I can assure you that your signature is not in the depository of the IEBC. The IEBC was just supposed to say: “Okay, the people who had signed the petition are registered voters and have identity card numbers against their names. We see an acknowledgement that they submitted a signature;” whether that signature was a perfect signature, written like somebody who went to Harvard University or University of Nairobi, like me, or somebody who did not go to school, like the sugarcane cutter in Kakamega, who chose to sign with a picture of a cow, that is a valid signature. A picture of a rat is also a signature. However, because they had to look for an excuse to please President Uhuru, they said there was an anomaly. After KANU had defeated the Jubilee Coalition in the Kericho by-election, they settled in some highrise building in Nairobi and started releasing some fake results purported to have come from Kericho, leading to the defeat of the KANU candidate. I have a lot of respect for Sen. Cheruiyot and I am not casting any aspersions against him, but Kenyans cannot sit back and fail to remove this Commission. If we fail, we will leave the fate of our children whom we love so much in the hands of gangsters. I have very beautiful daughters and I feel so nice when they come from school. These gangsters fish for excuses not to make a constitutional decision. I, therefore, insist that we must recall the thinking of the President, through the Constitution, so that from now hence forth – forever - current and future presidents will respect commissions. For example, under the Constitution, the Office of the Inspector General (IG) is supposed to be completely independent for manipulation. Unless the Cabinet Secretary is directing the IG on issues of policy, the IG is not supposed to be directed on all operational issues. Instead, what happens? When we went for a peaceful demonstration at the Anniversary Towers, the IG teargassed us. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}