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"content": "Therefore, as a country, I and my colleagues on this side and this Senate as a whole; taking the President’s advice, believe that we must now sit down, in the aftermath of the decision of the Supreme Court, and ask ourselves; what are some of the legislations that this House must pass to clarify the foundation of our democracy, which is the importance of the voter? Mr. Speaker, Sir, as I have said elsewhere – I also heard the Deputy President saying it elsewhere –that you cannot tell the voter that by marking a ballot paper, you will have spoken, made a decision and later through an entity that exercises donated or delegated responsibility without the benefit of having gone through this process, just wakes up by a simple majority of seven people and decides that you should have scrutinized your paper to ensure that it is laminated, had a serial number, has a stamp and that it has been transmitted electronically. The truth must be clarified by this House, the National Assembly and Parliament as a whole as to whether you can rob a citizen of his right under Article 38 of the Constitution which is about Political Rights, by virtue of using technicalities. In any case, the Constitution itself says that when interpreting the Constitution, you must give it life and meaning; and that it must respond to the culture and lifestyle of the people. You cannot start telling people to behave as though they are in Singapore if they are still living in Mandera, where basic rights such as water and roads are not available. Then you start telling them that as a result of not having something called the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS), a scanner and a 3G or a 4G network in your area, your right to vote was not successful. These are the things that I hope this House, borrowing from the President’s speech, can ask ourselves how we can better ensure that, in the near future under the Elections Act and laws, there is a clear provision as to when you can limit a right that citizens get to exercise only once every five years when the rest of us were exercising delegated responsibility and those of us who were indirectly representing the people here have a responsibility to do other things. Secondly, there has been debate whether the President should have come to the House yesterday; and that is what the President also spoke about yesterday. This takes us back. I know scholars of law who will write many journal articles and books on the history of Kenya in 2017 and the decision of the Supreme Court in so far as the nullification of the presidential results is concerned. In doing so, they will follow up on the words of the Chief Justice and the majority of the court, who came out and said that the presidential elections have not only been invalidated, but in the words of the Chief Justice, they are “null and void”. The simple division on null and void for legal practitioners, lawyers and scholars is that it is as though it never happened in the first place. So if, for example, that definition will be taken seriously because the Constitution says that the Supreme Court can invalidate an election, if that invalidation goes to the extent of declaration of nullity in the elections itself, it will, therefore, mean that we must erase in our minds that an election of the President took place on 8th August, 2017. If that is the application of the definition of the decision of the Supreme Court, it will then mean that the President, at any given time, never exercised temporary incumbency. If he did, then that temporary incumbency was nullified by the Supreme Court by declaring the"
}