Friday, April 30, 2021 – The fate of President Uhuru Kenyatta and ODM leader Raila Odinga’s Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), which is being debated in Parliament, now hangs in the balance.
This is after Senators vowed to defy the president and the former prime minister to amend the BBI Bill.
According to the Senators, the BBI Bill has several fundamental flaws that should be corrected before it is taken to a referendum.
The senators, in a rare show of political camaraderie, put aside their political affiliations and unanimously opposed any attempts to subject the BBI Bill to a referendum without specific changes.
The lawmakers, led by Raila’s man Okongo Omogeni, said besides typographical and referential errors, the bill has several unconstitutional clauses that Parliament must change before it is subjected to a referendum.
Some proposed amendments, they added, would roll back the gains the country has made and erode the fundamental spirit and structure of the Constitution.
“How will we look in the face of Kenyans if we take to them a bill that has errors?” Senator Okongo Omogeni posed.
“I am sure that even the President and Raila, the owners of the handshake, are not going to kill us before we have corrected these areas. The bill being considered in the NA does not have these errors,” he added.
Omogeni cited the proposed creation of 70 constituencies, terming the schedule creating them unconstitutional.
He also questioned the method used to allocate the constituencies to some 28 counties.
Murang’a Senator Irungu Kang’ata said the schedule creating the constituencies does not indicate the schedule to which it is anchored.
He argued that the bill should be amended or struck out in totality, saying the irregularities and illegalities contained therein are fundamental.
This comes even as members of the National Assembly appear to agree that Parliament cannot tinker with the bill.
E! News Blog
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