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{
    "id": 901314,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/901314/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 353,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Baringo North, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. William Cheptumo",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 50,
        "legal_name": "William Cheptumo Kipkiror",
        "slug": "william-kipkiror"
    },
    "content": "So, Departmental Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs had the highest because we had seven statutes to amend. That is why we become the lead Committee. Therefore, we were able to receive Reports from the various Committees and we tabled a compiled Report of those six Departmental Committees. I just want to mention that the Departmental Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs when considering amendments to the seven Statutes found some amendments justified to be undertaken because they are minor. They did not need very serious consideration or comprehensive review and we allowed them. But, there were those we found unnecessary for us to allow at the level of Miscellaneous Amendments. For example, there was a proposal to amend the Kenya School of Law (KSL) and the Legal Education Act. The ethics of that amendment was to liberalise the training of advocates. Currently, it is the KSL which has that mandate. There is a proposal in the Miscellaneous Amendment that this particular law should be liberalised so that the Council of Legal Education can allow other institutions and universities to train lawyers. I want the country to know that currently we have a very serious problem at the KSL. Out of 1,000 or 2,000 students we have about 70 or 80 per cent failing exams. Imagine a situation where we have invested in our young people, they have gone through the universities and are now waiting to do the Diploma at KSL for them to qualify as advocates. There is mass failure and this is an issue which came before our Committee earlier on and we raised it. Already, there is a task force headed by the Attorney General’s office to look at the entire issue of training of lawyers and get to the root cause of the mass failure. Is it that the admission of the law students’ standards has been reduced? What is the course? A student has gone through university and he/she has done very well and has been able to achieve a good grade in Form IV and university. There is no reason for that student not to go through the Kenya School of Law. During our time, about 25 years ago, you could have one or two students. During our time, I believe you could not have this kind of mass failure. What is the cause of it? We did not want to undertake this kind of amendment at this point because we wanted to receive the comprehensive taskforce report, see the kind of amendments we are introducing so that we undertake a reform in the entire legal profession. If you are to consider liberalising that process of training lawyers to other institutions, then we should be able to have the justification of doing so. We felt that this should not be allowed because we need wide consultations, public participation and all the stakeholders in this sector. We are really concerned about this issue and we are going to deal with it, especially with the report which I am now told is ready. We will consider it shortly. It has been said by the Leader of the Majority Party here that the Court of Appeal also wanted to change their programme or timetable for their recess during Easter recess, the August recess and during the Christmas holidays. We also noted that they were adding many days. The change or variation of their timetable is such that they were adding themselves another close to 30 days. We have a big backlog of cases in this country and we do not want a situation where we allow the Court of Appeal to have many days apart from their leave days or those other days during those holidays. So, we want to restrict that. We will be proposing a rejection to that proposal so that the Court of Appeal and the High Court should harmonise their vacation dates and timetable and we do not really spend a lot of time when we have cases of Kenyans remaining outstanding for very long. Finally, I will add to what the Leader of the Majority Party has said about the amendment to the Companies Act. There are a wide range of proposals to amend that particular law. We considered and allowed most of them. When you talk of allotting shares, one of the proposed The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}