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"content": "electoral matters must be done in Parliament and not outside. Therefore, I want to appreciate our colleagues in the CORD for coming to the realisation that this could only be done within Parliament. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, secondly, the agreement was reached one month ago. It has taken us about one month or 30 days to agree on the names of the people to sit in this Committee. If we understood the urgency of this matter, we should have agreed on these names in three or four days but we understand the delay was on the membership of Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale. I am happy that Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale is a Member of this Committee because he is qualified and I think we could not have gotten a better person to replace him. He is now part of the Committee but it should not have taken more than two or three days to agree on the name. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, if you look at the mandate of the Committee, you will see that it is clearly stipulated and very well done. However, I will urge the Committee to carry out public participation. There was a false perception given in this country that, generally, Kenyans are unhappy with the IEBC yet we could only see this being expressed in a few places in Nairobi, Kisumu and Homa Bay. When the Committee will be sitting to handle this particular matter, they should visit all the 47 counties in this Republic, so that the input of every Kenyan is captured. It will be unfair if two, three or four counties are taken to represent Kenya. I, therefore, call upon Sen. Mutula Kilonzo Jnr., the Co-Chair, Sen. Orengo, Sen. Murungi and the entire team to ensure that they do not carry out cosmetic public participation fora on such an important matter. Every member, every county and every Kenyan should get an opportunity to share their views on this particular matter. However, in the process of carrying out this entire exercise, they should avert a situation where you are likely to have a crisis because there is vacuum in terms of the existence of the IEBC. Therefore, we must allow the IEBC to continue doing its job as they look into this matter comprehensively, so that we do not have a situation where you have a vacuum in the body that is expected to carry out elections in this Republic at any one time. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, the Committee should also look at the issues relating to its mandate it vis-à-vis the electoral timetable. It is clear from both the coalitions that this country is not comfortable to the shifting of an election date; not a day earlier, not a day later. Therefore, as they work through the mandate of the Committee and propose the legal mechanisms, it should be understood that that has to be within the electoral cycle so that we have our elections next year in August. Therefore, all the changes must be done within that period. However, they also need to be honest enough. If the Committee finds that looking at the electoral timetable, certain comprehensive changes to the IEBC would affect the election timetable, they must be honest enough to tell Kenyans that these are the options available to Kenyans, so that we do not create a situation where you send officials of the IEBC home and you have only six or eight months before the elections are held and the new team of commissioners that you bring into office are unable to carry out the necessary systems. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, if you look at the issues that were raised by the CORD and many other Kenyans in the elections petitions that went to court, a number of those challenges also relate to the systems within the IEBC. I do not think that a credible The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate"
}