•Money bills originate from the National Assembly.
•Ministry says compensation proposal may be considered in an ongoing overhaul of Tourism and Wildlife laws.
Image: JOSEPH KANGOGO
Lawmakers at the National Assembly have stopped the bid by their Senate counterparts to reintroduce snakebites as among animal attacks to be compensated by the Kenya Wildlife Service.
The National Assembly Environment Committee has recommended that the bill setting stage for the compensation be rejected for want of procedure in the first place.
The Maara MP Kareke Mbiuki-led team has thus asked members at the plenary to throw out the Wildlife Conservation and Management (Amendment) Bill, 2020, proposed by the Senate.
“We recommend that the bill be rejected since it is a money bill in line with Article 114 of the Constitution,” the committee said in its report tabled in Parliament recently.
“Since there is an ongoing comprehensive review of the law, the proposed amendments will be considered when the Tourism and Wildlife ministry submits the new bill to Parliament for review,” Mbiuki said.
Senators sought to include poisonous snakes, dangerous snakes, shark, stone fish, whale, sting ray, and wild pigs in the list of animals whose attacks KWS is bound to compensate victims - for death and injury.
The bill by Taita Taveta Senator Jones Mwaruma was to add the animals to the list that already contains elephant, lion, leopard, rhino, hyena, crocodile, cheetah, and buffalo.
KWS, through a Statutes Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act, 2018, had amended the Wildlife law to delete poisonous snake, shark, stone fish, whale, sting ray, and wild pig as wildlife species in respect of which compensation may be paid.
The bill Senator Mwaruma sought to overturn was assented to in December 2018 and came into force in January 2019, locking out victims with compensation claims for snakebites.
It also sought that victims of wildlife attacks leading to death, human injury, crop or property damage be compensated within 12 months.
But Mbiuki team says the Senate bill meets the criteria of a money bill hence ought to have been introduced in the National Assembly first.
“As such the National Assembly is required to take into consideration the recommendations of the Budget and Appropriations Committee when debating the bill,” the Environment committee said.
“Further to this, a money bill can only be introduced in the National Assembly in accordance with Article 109 (5) of the Constitution. Therefore the bill should have been first introduced in the National Assembly and not the Senate,” the committee concluded.
The Parliamentary Budget Office and the Tourism and Wildlife ministry gave their views on the bill during the review by the committee.
For its part, PBO said the introduction of the seven new species may lead to the additional provision of funds by the ministry through KWS.
Already, KWS as of July 2021 had a backlog of pending compensation claims to the tune of about Sh14 billion.
The Budget team argued that some of the proposals – namely the creation of the Wildlife Conservation Trust Fund for affected communities – were an imposition of a new charge to a public fund.
They said additional costs would follow the efforts to extend benefit-sharing of resources collected from wildlife to persons not bordering national parks but have been negatively affected by activities related to the preservation of national parks.
For its part, the Najib Balala –led ministry held that the proposed amendments were being looked into comprehensively and will be harmonized with other submissions from various stakeholders.
“The comprehensive review is being done in the interest of the public with a view of repealing the current Act and coming up with a new law that effectively addresses the many current ongoing issues so as to avoid piecemeal amendments,” the ministry said.