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{
    "id": 936630,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/936630/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 333,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Kihika",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13216,
        "legal_name": "Susan Wakarura Kihika",
        "slug": "susan-wakarura-kihika"
    },
    "content": "power is diluted because they do not have a gender sensitive delegation. That is one of the things that we can force parliaments to be cognizant of. As I speak, women are just as many as men. The census just came out, we saw that the women are about 51 per cent. There is no reason why we cannot have more woman at the table. We are working extremely hard to do so. As the President of the Bureau of Women Parliamentarians, that is one of my major priority. As far as the youth are concerned, Sen. M. Kajwang’ you are very right. By the way, the IPU is one of the first places that I went to and discovered that youth means up to 45 years. For the first time, we were all youth. However, we are also working with parliaments to put in place laws, because there are some countries where you cannot run for office, even as a member of parliament, unless you are 30 years old. I know Nigeria had that rule but they did away with that. We are working with parliaments that have those sort of limitations to take those out and just leave it to 18 years. This is to ensure that even younger members are able to represent. As we know, for example, here in Kenya, the youth make up 66 per cent of the population going by the recently released census results. We would be disenfranchising them if we required that only people above 35 years would run. Granted, we do not have those sorts of laws in our country the youth are able to run. Those are some of the things that we are trying to do so that we can enhance democracy across the world. There is also the issue of human rights. I wanted to point that out for your information and for all the other parliamentarians that we also work with human rights for parliamentarians. We are not just talking about human rights for the citizens of a country, but for parliamentarians. A few months ago, I went to the US Congress in Washington D.C. where we were able to present cases for some parliamentarians in some countries in the world where maybe you have been put under house arrest so you cannot go to parliament; or some trumped up charges have been brought against you and you are not able to go to parliament because now you have been detained. So, here we are talking about protecting our parliamentarians so that they are able to dispense their mandate. Sen. Halake did very well in pointing out the education issues on the 140th Assembly. Education is a universal right across the world. We should not have a world where anybody is unable to access education. That is one of the places I would say Kenya has really done quite well, beginning with having free primary education. When you sit there with 178 other parliamentarians, you will be surprised to realize that in some areas we are really doing well. Yesterday I also attended the Tallberg Dinner in the evening. As speaker after speaker spoke, many of them were not even from the African continent. Some were from the African continent, but they continuously praised Kenya. Sometimes I have often wondered, we do not seem to really appreciate what a beautiful country we have. We seem to be doing very well when it comes to parliamentary diplomacy at the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). When you walk to many of the IPU panels, you will find Members of the Kenyan delegation giving substantive engagements. We have also held good positions because we have put ourselves forward. In my case, I had to, first of all, be elected by the African Geo-political Group from East, West, South and North. The elections are very political and they at times become the politics of The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}