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"speaker_name": "Mr. Baiya",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to acknowledge the eloquent manner in which the Chair of the Committee of Justice and Legal Affairs has moved the Motion. He has moved the Motion and I am rising to second it. As is well known in the public domain, the work of IIBRC has, at the end of the day, subjected this country to a controversy in terms of sharing the 80 new constituencies. By the nature of the exercise that this Commission was given to undertake, it ended up as a divisive exercise. This was borne out by the fact that Parliament had actually failed in previous years - like in 2007 - to carry out the process conclusively. Therefore, the country is supposed to go through a review of the constituencies every ten years. But that has not happened for some time. That was, therefore, a critical test to undertake the exercise immediately we had adopted the new Constitution. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, concerns were raised both ways. On the one side, there were people who felt that they benefited from the new constituencies and they sought to ensure that they safeguarded those gains. On the other hand, there were concerns by a number of people who thought that IIBRC may not have fully brought into account the full constitutional principles that it was enshrined to do under the Constitution. In trying to arrive at the consensus that we are bringing to this House to adopt as a way forward, we tried to merge the two sides. In this regard, I would want to state some of those concerns because they also touch on our ability, as a country, to implement the new Constitution as we had committed to do through the promulgation of the new Constitution. While we were trying to grumble with the issues that were being raised, we had a sitting at the Kenya Institute of Administration (KIA) at Kabete. We invited certain professionals or consultants who had also been invited by IIBRC. They came to KIA and gave us their own critique on the work of IIBRC. I would like to put their views into account. As a country that wants to go forward, it is also important that we take into account what professionals are telling us. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if I may quote those two experts--- One of them was F.W. Aduol and the other was Sakaja Johnson. In an executive summary that they presented, I want to quote what Sakaja said:- âAn analysis of the work of IIBRC Report shows a number of technical inconsistencies and legal oversights in the methodology employed by the Commission in the submission of its work. The Commission did not adhere to the criteria and delimits provided for in the Constitution. As a result of this, the Commission was unable to fully achieve the objective for which it was created. Equal representation has not been achieved nationally and in many cases, gross disparities in constituency population have been maintained. Whereas many constituencies remain overpopulated and way above the legal range that is set in the Constitution, some have been moved further away from the quota by way of unmerited splitting. The Commission also failed to constructively consult the public and other interested parties in the spirit of the provisions in the new Constitution.â That being the conclusions of the professionals, it is my view in seconding this Motion that these are fundamental issues touching on the constitutional viability of the proposed delimitations which have been highlighted in four areas. The first concern related to the method that was used by IIBRC â the population quota. Section 89(6) of the Constitution gives maximum permissible departure of 40 per cent in cities and sparsely populated areas and 30 per cent in other areas. This is a very specific criteria given by the Constitution. Section 89(7) allows consultations to all interested parties. That is also a constitutional criterion. Section 89(7)(b) sets up the criteria for progressive advance towards population quota. That is a requirement by the Constitution. However, if you look at the process and product that was given by IIBRC, there is a substantial departure from some of those methods. That is what our consultants brought out. For example, if you look at a City like Nairobi, the maximum departure on the upward side was about 186,000 people per constituency. But in this same area of Nairobi, you will find we have a proposed constituency like Starehe with a population of about 104,000 people. The other thing is that having taken Nairobi to have 186,000 people to be the maximum, they adopted the population quota criteria for other areas to be 129,000 people. The criterion which was applied for the rest of the country was clearly unconstitutional in light of the population quota given in the Constitution. The other major methodological challenge is that the Constitution requires the Commission to look at every constituency on its own merit. They are supposed to look at the various criteria against every single constituency. But the approach they used is what we call provinces. We know provinces used to be there in the old Constitution, but they are not there in the current Constitution. In doing so, they ended up favouring some areas at the expense of others. They had no mandate to do so, because the current Constitution no longer recognizes provinces."
}