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{
    "id": 972141,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/972141/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 557,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kitutu Masaba, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Shadrack Mose",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13390,
        "legal_name": "Shadrack John Mose",
        "slug": "shadrack-john-mose-2"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. First and foremost, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would like to appreciate and thank the Committee for a Report that is well researched and represented. I listened carefully to the Chairman and the Seconder — who incidentally were my classmates — and I was thoroughly impressed. I would also want, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, before I forget, to concur entirely with the submissions of the Member of Parliament for West Mugirango on Article 166 of the Constitution. We need to respect and follow the Constitution. Nothing is left to us in the Constitution as an option of any further delay. In fact, we need to amend that bit of the Constitution and add a rider, that if the President does not appoint judges within a given period — for instance within 7 or 14 days — then we should have those judges automatically appointed. Indeed, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, the doctrine of separation of powers, where we are talking about the Judiciary, Legislature and Executive, is anchored in the Constitution. We need to secure the independence of the Judiciary by ensuring that we give them the financial support that they require. How would this happen? We need to anchor in our Constitution a provision where we have a direct financing—a certain percentage of financing—that should go directly to the Judiciary without having to go through National Treasury — where you will be told that there is no Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) or it has an issue— and at the end of the day, this has a lot of consequences that affect the entire administration of justice. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, a lot has been detailed in this Report but largely, if we all listened to the Chief Justice of the Republic of Kenya, he was in a lot of problems when he addressed us. One of the issues that the CJ raised was the issue of funding. As far as I know, funding is almost everything to the Judiciary. Talk of the human resources which means the people who serve in the Judiciary — the clerks and all the personnel — if you do not have enough of these who are the facilitators of the justice system, at the end of the day you will not make progress. Secondly, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I am extremely shocked to learn that since 2018, there has not been employment of magistrates in this country. What does that tell you? Whereas the number of cases is continually increasing on a daily basis, the number of staff and magistrates that will be able to handle these cases remains stagnant. Therefore, that would lead to a backlog of cases. When you talk about the backlog of cases, it means day in, day out, as we continue to register cases in our registries, the number of cases that are being handled by a single magistrate will continue to increase. So, the number of cases that they are going to address in a single day will remain the same but the backlog will increase. 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."
}