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{
    "id": 902001,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/902001/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 241,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Emuhaya, ANC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Omboko Milemba",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13328,
        "legal_name": "Jeremiah Omboko Milemba",
        "slug": "jeremiah-omboko-milemba"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Speaker. I want to contribute to this Bill by identifying three areas. One is the Merchant Shipping Act. Like already indicated by earlier speakers, the Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill or the omnibus as we talked about it in the morning, is being used to sneak in certain laws, which will advantage certain groups of people, maybe business people or companies that have vested interest in certain areas. On this particular Act, the powers that should be vested in the institution of Parliament are being surrendered to a Cabinet Secretary who can change it anytime. Therefore, from my position of looking at it, we should oppose. I stand alongside other MPs to ensure this particular one does not go through. Secondly, I want to comment on the Parliamentary Service Commission. Again, this is a major law which requires us to look at it as a substantive law. But, it has been introduced as a minor law within the Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill. In this case, we want to create extra Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in the PSC. The PSC like all other commissions is created under Chapter 15 of the Constitution. All these commissions have one CEO but in our case we want to create a multiplicity of CEOs. If we look at Article 127 of the Constitution, the Chair of PSC is the Speaker and the Secretary is the Clerk of the Senate. Whoever made this law must have been very keen to look at the sharing and balance of power between the two Houses. Therefore, enhance checks and balances in the operation of the House. But, now in this Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill, we want to create not only two but three accounting officers in the PSC. Therefore, I think this is an area that requires serious revisiting by the entire House. I almost compare this to the laws that were made somewhere in 1966 when we had Kenya African National Union (KANU) as a political party and the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was the Vice-President. To vulgarise the powers of Odinga a number of other Vice-Presidents were created and if you follow your history now that the previous speaker talked about having been a very good student of history, that is how Odinga resigned from KANU and moved to another party and that is a story for another day. I think this law is not in good faith. It is actually supposed to vulgarise the Office of the Secretary to the PSC. Therefore, I do not support it and we shall be making amendments to the extent of opposing. Lastly, is the amendment that concerns the Court of Appeal, we want to again make a law that will influence the operations of the Court of Appeal. There must be a reason why there is separation of powers between the three arms of Government, that is: the Executive, Parliament as the Legislature and the Judiciary. For us to pretend that now we want to control or make a law that will in essence change the Act that governors and manages the courts, we are overstepping our powers to manage the court system. This will actually beat the principle of separation of powers. If anything, we shall again be dealing with the laws that deal with labour, that is, the Labour Relations Act which 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."
}