With every constitution and every constitution-making process, no one walks away with 100 per cent. There is always that percentage that one would still want to be addressed before the final document is adopted.
If I may go back and look at the making of the American constitution, some of the delegates who were in Philadelphia walked out. None of them was satisfied 100 per cent with what had been arrived at. Maybe, some had 80 per cent satisfaction, others had 90 per cent or even 50 per cent, but they came to a consensus.
What I am trying to say is that for everyone, there is always something that they wish would be changed and probably make the constitution even better. So the question of what should be changed will be answered differently depending on the person you are asking. Everybody will have a different opinion on what should be changed.
About our current constitution, for me personally, especially after the Naivasha meeting, some of the things that I felt needed to be amended revolved around human rights and issues of integrity. When you look at the previous draft, there were no details on these issues. Land and environment matters were another area I wished could have been changed.
For those of us who were technically dealing with the document, there were aspects we all felt were lost in terms of details in different parts of the document. They included citizenship, culture and many others.
Those were some of the aspects I wish we could have done better. But also, broadly there are perennial contentious issues and we had flagged them and we still see them coming up all the time.
They are issues around how devolution should work and issues surrounding the presidential or parliamentary or hybrid system of government. Our consensus as Committee of Experts was to go with a semi-parliamentary/semi-presidential system of government.
We flagged the issue and said as much as we had a consensus, we still felt the matter would keep coming up.
Bobby Mkangi, a constitutional lawyer, spoke to the Star.
