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{
    "id": 731427,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/731427/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 409,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Bunyasi",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2511,
        "legal_name": "John Sakwa Bunyasi",
        "slug": "john-sakwa-bunyasi"
    },
    "content": "Let me comment on some general issues around these Regulations and the emotions they seem to evoke in different persons in this country. People have talked about trust. Trust without verification is complete naivety. You might trust as much as you can - you trust your wife, your husband and your children - but verification is an important component. I see that there is enormous concern that people who have gone to school in this Republic, probably millions of them, should not be allowed to do basic arithmetic of adding when any of these Members in this House, including myself, do our own tallying on the day of elections. I create a wall room with laptops and phones and do my own tallying. We count the figures before I walk to the tallying centre. I do not go there to discover the numbers. There may be differences because of, maybe, the way they transmitted figures and they can be inter-posed by those with small errors of margin. I cannot walk from my house and go to the tallying centre completely unknowing what the numbers are. That is my small constituency of one MP. What about the whole Republic? When you are running, your constituency is the republic. Why would do you not want to do that? I see no big deal about the National Super Alliance (NASA) saying they will have a tallying centre. We know the law says that the only entity that can announce the legal results is going to be the IEBC. But should there be such a small difference in the margin of error, that is fine. But if the difference is in the order of magnitude that runs into millions, they will know that something is fundamentally wrong. There should be absolutely no basis for panic. When people argue that you cannot tally and some Members have said they have not seen anywhere in the world where this has happened--- Next time when you watch TV, for example, about the American politics, who do you hear from? You hear from CNN and various news agencies. You do not hear from the agency that has the legal mandate to tally and there is one. In the case of America, it is the various secretaries of the various states who are the custodians of the formal results which are cast, as you know, when they hold elections in the first week of November. They are not broadcast until sometime in December. That is when you get the official results but, people know the decisions of the people of that country based on the tallying returns that are done by the news media. Why would you gag them? The moment the results have been announced at the polling centre, it is public information. Whether you decide to tally it or just pick yours and go home, that is your business. I do not see it contravening anything about access to information. I do not see it usurping any institution’s authority and nobody has suggested that the power to announce the official results will be taken away from the IEBC. So, I get surprised. My compatriot from my county has left. It is interesting to hear the new tune. That is, of course, within everybody’s constitutional rights and so on, but none of this is usurping IEBC’s powers. The concern is that whereas there has been trust, people are nervous about verification. Let us not keep referring to the 2007 elections as if some were victims and others were perpetrators. This was all a very costly affair and we do not want to go there. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}