Once again, our bloated Parliament has come back to haunt us. An audit by a team set up by the National Assembly has, for the second time in as many years, come up with the inevitable finding that Kenyans are over-represented in the two levels of Government as established by the Constitution.
When Kenyans set out to make a new constitution, they wanted a representative yet manageable legislative assembly at the national and county levels.
According to the final report of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission compiled at the end of its term in 2005, Kenyans wanted a bicameral parliament whose members satisfy moral and ethical standards for election.
They wanted their MPs – both at the Upper House or the Senate as it is now called in the adopted constitution to be composed of 69 members - one from each of the districts as last demarcated in 2005, and a member from Nairobi.
Other members of the Senate according to this formula would have been 30 women – four from each of the seven provinces as the country was then administratively divided and two from Nairobi. This would have made a total of 100 Senators with the one-third gender principle already taken into account.
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As for the Lower House, now called the National Assembly, the CKRC report says that members be 210, elected from each of the constituencies as then demarcated by the electoral commission, and another 90 members nominated through mixed-member proportional representation electoral system.
In other words, as parties go into elections seeking to capture the 210 constituencies, they would also be required to submit a list of 90 women to be nominated based on the strength of political parties in the constituencies. Going by Kenya’s past election results, this formula would have also ensured that at least one-third of the total membership of the National Assembly are women.
This would have kept the number of National Assembly members to 300 and the Senate at 100, making a total of 400 legislators for both Houses of Parliament had we remained faithful to Wanjiku’s views.
And given that all parties had abused the provision for the 12 slots for nomination as provided in the former constitution, the CKRC report expressed strong views against this being left to the whims of political party leaders, recommending that they be abolished altogether but if retained, restricted to marginalised groups such as women, persons with disabilities and ethnic minorities for purposes of affirmative action.
But that was before a group of MPs, some of whom are now shouting themselves hoarse about the need to reduce the number of MPs, went for a parley in Naivasha in the second and final stretch of the constitution-making process. By then, the Committee of Experts led by Nzamba Kitonga had taken over leadership of the constitution-making process.
It did not occur to some of the MPs that they would want to vie for the Senate in future. From both sides of the political divide obtaining at the time – Raila Odinga’s ODM and Mwai Kibaki’s PNU, the MPs seemed to have been unanimous in their conspiracy to whittle down the powers and influence of the Senate.
With all of them serving in the one-chamber Parliament, the MPs fashioned out the National Assembly into a behemoth, increasing the number of constituencies from 210 to 290.
And as if that was not large enough, they carved out 47 counties from each of which additional women would be elected to cater for some tokenistic gender representation in the National Assembly.
They then retained the additional 12 nominated slots, most of which were dished out to non-deserving individuals after the 2013 elections. This brings the number of MPs in the National Assembly to 349 and together with the Speaker, to 350!
While the Naivasha parley did a commendable job of reducing the Senate from 100 members as had been proposed earlier to 68, the National Assembly remains the culprit for its selfish acts of commission and omission.
It usurped and arrogated to itself the functions and powers traditionally reserved for the Senate as provided in the final harmonised draft constitution.
It is also this parley of self-interested legislators that takes the blame for the non-realisation of the two-thirds gender principle in the legislative assembly at the national level of government.
While Parliament is supposed to be representative, there is a sense in which the small group of MPs who met in Naivasha to build consensus overstepped its mandate at the expense of other core functions of Parliament.
Our Parliament is not representative given that it does not meet the two-thirds constitutional gender principle, let alone serving its oversight and law-making functions.
It therefore makes a lot of sense to review and evaluate the efficacy of our Parliament as currently constituted, with a view to making it more representative and fit for purpose.
