National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi okays petition to slash 35 counties

National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi yesterday delivered to MPs a petition to amend the Constitution to do away with 35 counties, the hundreds nominated members of county assemblies, the huge number of nominated women MPs, and to have all judges of the Supreme Court operate on a part-time basis.

There was rare enthusiasm when Muturi read the petition signed by Eric Barare Orina as Majority Leader Aden Duale asked the administrators of the House to make sure that each of the 349 Members of Parliament gets a copy, as the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee sits down to scrutinise the petition in the next 60 days.

The MPs may finally have got their way to hit back at the Executive and the Supreme Court because Orina has given them a window to amend the Constitution to make it mandatory for the President to pick his Cabinet from the National Assembly, in a bicameral Parliament that also has the Senate.
Orina argues in the petition that the change is crucial because Cabinet secretaries have so far failed to meet parliamentary expectations on how they do their job.

As to the Supreme Court, he says, as presently constituted, the highest court in the land has no work to warrant full-time judges.
The petition also seeks to end the monopoly of political parties when it comes to nominating people to the House. He says the civil society, professional bodies and trade unions had played a key role in the making of the four-year-old Constitution, and therefore should be involved in nurturing it.

He said the input from these unions will be crucial to the Legislature.
Orina also wants to extend the period that the Supreme Court uses to adjudicate presidential petitions from the current 21 days to a maximum of two months.
"The period provided is too short for any substantive litigation to be conducted as the experience of the 2013 presidential petition showed," read the petition.

The Justice and Legal Affairs Committee will have to summon Orina to hear his rationale for the radical amendments to the country's four-year-old Constitution.
In the petition, Orina argues that there was no point having a two-thirds gender cap on the number of women in elective politics and the many nominated MCAs, because, that simply made the country's politics expensive. He argued that the 47 counties were difficult to run.
"The creation of an unknown number of seats to satisfy a politically artificial gender balance will pose severe problems for an economy that is yet to adjust to the new expanded governance structure," the petitioner added.