Draft constitution goes public

Public debate on the new constitution starts on Tuesday after the Committee of Experts formally publishes its draft at KICC, Nairobi.

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The draft will be reprinted in full in the Daily Nation on Wednesday. The experts will ask Kenyans to give their views on the proposed constitution, which seeks to fundamentally change the way the country is governed.

This will be the only chance for the public to take part in the process. After the one-month debate, the experts will have another 21 days to incorporate wananchi’s (citizens') views in the draft, then turn it over to the Parliamentary Select Committee on the constitution.

Already, politicians are divided over how power is to be shared within the Executive. A team from both ODM and PNU set up to build consensus is yet to make any progress on how to resolve the difference and is scheduled to meet on Tuesday.

The experts are proposing government at three levels. At the national level, Parliament will have two chambers — the senate and the national assembly. The national assembly will be more powerful and will be responsible for the appointment of a prime minister, who will be head of government. There will also be governments at regional and county levels.

After six meetings and a retreat in Mombasa, the Grand Coalition Consensus Committee on Constitutional Reform abandoned its report after it failed to strike a deal on how the president and the prime minister are to share power. On Monday, it emerged that PNU protested that the document which was to be given at the retreat as the compromise between the two parties had more of ODM proposals. PNU argued that the compromise amounted to endorsing an imperial presidency.

“There was a feeling that the harmonised position was more in favour of the ODM proposals and no consensus had been reached,” a member of committee said. The report, a copy of which the Daily Nation has seen, shows that the major bone of contention is who between the president and prime minister would be head of government.

The parties disagreed on who would preside over the Cabinet and the National Security Council. They could also not agree on who should appoint public officers and how this was to be done. The two parties also differed on how the executive should be established. PNU proposes that whoever wields the executive authority must be elected directly by the people.

Popularly-elected

ODM on the other hand says that there should be a popularly elected president and a prime minister who is leader of the party with the highest number of MPs. However, PNU opposed this proposal and said that the PM should be the MP who commands majority support in Parliament.

But the parties agree that a hybrid system is the best. “The committee considered that neither the pure presidential or pure parliamentary system would be suitable today, given the history of the presidential system on one hand, and the fragile nature of political parties in Kenya, on the other,” reads the report.

The draft constitution will be launched at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre at 10am. The committee of experts has invited the public to attend the launch.