- Registrar to give speakers details of coalitions deposited with his or her office.
- Lack of clear guidelines forced Wetang'ula to rule on the Majority status at the onset of 13 Parliament.
Image: BY MATHEWS NDANYI
Major political parties will no longer hold at ransom small outfits during coalition formation, especially on the content of the deal if a bill before Parliament passes.
The Political Parties (Amendment) Bill, 2022 seeks to compel the Registrar of Political Parties to deposit with the Clerks of the National Assembly and Senate any coalition agreement filed in her office.
The Registrar of Political Parties is the custodian of all coalition instruments between political parties.
According to the drafter of the Bill, National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gladys Shollei, such information will be useful for deciding entitlement, especially those based on the numerical strength of the coalitions in the House.
“The principal object of this Bill is to amend the political Parties Act, 2011 to require the Registrar of Political Parties to convey to the Clerk of each House of Parliament any coalition agreement deposited into his or her office,” the Bill states.
“The agreements shall be useful to the Houses of Parliament in relation to determination of questions on the entitlement of parties and coalitions that are tied to their number of members in each House.”
“The amendment further requires the registrar to convey any agreement existing as at the commencement of its provisions to the Clerk of each House of Parliament. ”
At the beginning of the 13th Parliament, there was a heated debate between Kenya Kwanza and Azimio la Umoja on who between the two formations had numbers to be the majority in the two Houses.
Both sides claimed majority status, forcing Speaker Moses Wetang’ula to issue a ruling declaring Kenya Kwanza as having the majority members, a ruling that Azimio protested.
According to the ruling, Kenya Kwanza has 179 members in the House against Azimio’s 157.
The new law change, once operational, will automatically cure a situation where major parties keep as secret weapon details of the coalition agreements and not availing the same to their other partners in the alliance.
By filing agreements with the Clerk, such agreements will no longer be under lock and key of dominant parties in coalitions like is the case now.
The situation was widespread in the run-up to the August polls, where several Azimio affiliated parties complained of being unable to access the coalition agreement.
Some of the parties that claimed they were kept in the dark over the coalition agreement included Mandera Senator Ali Roba’s United Democratic Movement (UDM) and Ugenya MP David Ochieng’s Movement for Democratic Growth (MDG).
They have all decamped to President William Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza team.
The Shollei’s Bill has been formally introduced in Parliament and is now awaiting first reading once Parliament resumes from long recess in February 2023.