Members of Parliament on Thursday changed the election law yet again, making a nonsense of the original intention of the law that was to enforce discipline and end party-hopping ahead of polls.
They allowed themselves another 15 days within which to defect from the parties that sponsored them to Parliament.
If they had not changed the law, a majority of them would have been deemed to have defected on January 4, when they are required to confirm the parties on whose ticket they will run, thereby losing their parliamentary seats.
They had previously extended the deadline for defections from October 17 to January 4.
Party hopping and lack of discipline in political parties are what the framers of the new Constitution wanted to end when they introduced time frames by which politicians were expected to declare their intended tickets.
On Thursday, Attorney-General Githu Muigai successfully moved an amendment to get 15 more days within which to decide on the parties they would use to contest in the next elections.
The amended Elections Act extends the deadline by which political parties are expected to submit the membership list to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to be the same day that the candidates will present their papers to the commission.
“A political party that nominates a person for any election under this Act shall submit to the Commission a party membership list of the party at least 45 days before the date of the general election,” section 29 of the amended Elections Act now reads.
But the amendment will only come into effect once President Kibaki signs it into law.
The change of date puts pressure on the IEBC to verify the party lists and to also clear candidates who will appear on the more than 100 million ballot papers to be used in the next polls.
IEBC had hoped to use the 15 days to verify the names before accepting papers from the candidates after the primaries, but now, it will all happen on the same day, and verification may not be done.
The amendment also ensures that the 10th Parliament will continue to sit until the expiry of its five-year term on January 14, 2013.
The law as it is right now requires that the presentation of party lists be done at least 60 days to the election date. That had put the final date of nomination to January 4, 2013, now that the General Election will be held on March 4, 2013.
Speaker Kenneth Marende had been apprehensive that the House might hit a legal wall if the January 4 deadline — 60 days to elections — had remained in the statute.
He had already warned MPs that their term in the House would be untenable, because it was expected that many of them who had already changed parties would not be eligible to sit in the House, having formally quit the parties that sponsored them to Parliament in the first place.
On Thursday, Prof Muigai said he had brought the amendment to make it “congruent” with the day that candidates would submit their nomination papers to the IEBC.
The change was introduced as part of the Omnibus Bill — the Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendment) Bill, 2012.
After the amendment sailed through, MPs were heard within the corridors of the House celebrating the extension.
Source:nation.co.ke
