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{
    "id": 690371,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/690371/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 506,
    "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": "I wish to support the Bill and indicate that this is a negotiated document. A negotiated document is like a two-edged sword – it cuts both ways. That is why you heard Hon. Duale, while moving; making reference to the International Criminal Court (ICC). I remember that at the beginning of that saga, we spoke here and said, “Let us not be vague, let us go to the Hague” and then we came back from The Hague with a crashed egg on our face. Today we are carrying the wheat and chaff because our role in Parliament is both political and legal. This is one of the times when we are doing both the legal and the political bits. We are doing the political, which is to carry the country forward. That is why you are seeing Hon. Duale and other leaders speaking strongly to non-amendments. However, that does not take away our constitutional right to amend the document, if we want. We are working both as politicians and legislators. That is why you see, for the first time, Hon. Duale being very thankful to Hon. Jakom for helping him and even enabling him to be appointed as Minister, something that he rarely does. It is only Hon. Isaack Mwaura that I have seen exercising a lot of maturity even as he wants to transit from his current political party. I want to congratulate him. We need to move in that direction as politicians. When you have been supported by a party and you get to a point where you want to leave, do not become the devil. It is probably because of his circumstances, which are dictated by the nation and sometimes by the ethnic nature of our country, that have forced him to go the direction he is going but he is thankful. I want to congratulate him for that decision. I want to speak very quickly to certain issues. One of the proposed amendments is on the issue of a web portal, which is pretty good in theory but we know what Kenya is with technology. I am one of the people who are worried of technology. At the push of a button in technology, you can change the history of the world. In past elections, we believed that the course of this nation was changed at the click of a button. I was very fortunate to very recently, through the Pan African Parliament (PAP), to observe elections in Zambia. One of the things that we have not picked up – which I wish we had picked up from Zambia – is the tedious process they go through. They do name and photo verification when people go to vote. It just means that you have more polling clerks but you do not have dead voters and other people voting. The only challenge when we were leaving Zambia is that many people were saying that they wished we had stayed longer up to the point when people had been elected. Their concern is that many elections are stolen at the point of tallying. A lot of times elections are stolen electronically. We have moved away from hitting people with pangas and beating people to more of electronic violence. I am very worried of technology because it is a new way of doing voter rigging. All I can do even as I sit here, if I want to change the course of many things, is to substitute Mbita with North Mugirango and all the election results of Mbita automatically will be exchanged with those of North Mugirango. I am worry of that sort of thing. The issue of audit is very good. However, I would wish that we had defined what audit is because in law, the devil is in the detail. What is audit? If we say we shall audit and then we leave it to anybody to define what audit is, somebody can sleep in their house and when they wake up they say they dreamt that they audited and that qualifies as auditing or somebody might just read a document and say that they have audited. So, what exactly is auditing? Can we define “auditing” in this law? I also want to speak to the issue of party-hopping. The last time I spoke in the House, I said---"
}