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{
"id": 982285,
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Pareno",
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"speaker": {
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"legal_name": "Judith Ramaita Pareno",
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"content": "to have moved it, is never present. You have bothered the SBC to consider your business and they have left others. However, at the end of the day, you are not there to process it. Madam Temporary Speaker, remember that you and I sit on that Chair. Sometimes we adjourn before time, not because of the SBC not doing their job of putting the business on the Order Paper, but those that are supposed to move are not present to do so. Therefore, I am begging that we improve on this, so that we help them to ensure that the business is there in the Order Paper every day. Madam Temporary Speaker, my reservation is on the gender balance. We cannot keep on speaking here about affirmative action and how we should be balanced; and then here we are talking about BBI and bringing people together and yet we continue to leave out each other when it comes to positions. We have seven Members of the SBC. Out of the seven Members, we only have two ladies. Surely, we have the ones that are more or less automatic like the Senate leaders, and we respect that they should be there. However, I am not saying that the ones that we added do not have capacity. Far from that, they have capacity. Each and every Member in this House has the capacity to serve in any Committee. Madam Temporary Speaker, when it came to adding those other Members, we should have considered gender balance and ensured that, at the end of the day, we have a Committee that has everybody on board. Maybe we cannot undo what we have already done, because we have already done it, but we want to see an improvement in the next formation when we have to reconstitute this Committee. This House has only one female Member who is a Chair out of all the Committees of this House. The rest are just either deputies - which is also a good position - but it is also good for men as well. Why do we assume that ladies cannot chair? I blame this on the formation as it was then. For some reason, it was felt that the ladies should not be there. We actually struggled at that time to ask; why do we not have ladies? At the moment, all the chairs are male Senators, and only one who we just picked in the Committee on National Cohesion, Equal Opportunity and Regional Integration, because she is able and she was acting as the Chair almost throughout. Sen. Naomi Waqo is the only female who is now a Chair of a Committee. To me, this is not a good indication. As a Senate, we cannot say that others are not looking at the provisions of the law in as far as the mandate of the Senate is concerned and, at the same time, ignore something as important as gender balance and affirmative action when we form these Committees. I want to applaud the Members that had served earlier on and say that they did well. At all times, we had business, but I call upon that business to be processed. Madam Temporary Speaker, we cannot keep complaining throughout that our Bills do not go through and that the National Assembly is doing the usual things that they do to derail whatever processes that we are undertaking. We should take a step further. I was thinking of how to solve this problem. We are going to name and shame all of those who go to derail our programmes and then they reintroduce them. It is a shame for Members to work so hard and put all that input in a Bill then one derails it only to go and reintroduce it. To me, the next thing we should do is to name and shame all of these people. 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."
}