MPs' team opts for powerful president

Kenya is to have a powerful president whose authority will be checked by Parliament, the Judiciary and regional governments, a parliamentary team resolved on Thursday. And to deepen the separation between Parliament and the Executive, Cabinet ministers will not be MPs.

The agreement on the system of government was reached on Wednesday night by the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Constitution meeting at the Great Rift Valley Lodge in Naivasha.

Turning point

No formal announcement of the decision was made and the information about the agreement was obtained from interviews with many of the MPs attending the sessions. The meeting is covered by parliamentary rules and members are barred from revealing the discussions. The agreement could be a significant turning point in the country’s failed attempts to write a new constitution in the last two decades.

Going into the meeting, the issue of the system of government was among the most contentious with one half of the government preferring a presidential system and the other a parliamentary system with a ceremonial president while a prime minister elected by MPs exercises executive authority.

The draft, which the 26 members of the PSC are going through, recommended a hybrid system of government where the premier and the president shared power. But both partners in the coalition, Orange Democratic Movement and Party of National Unity, were nervous about a situation where there would be two centres of power.

In opinion polls, it was also reported that many respondents preferred a system where the leader is directly elected but that many felt there should be a prime minister.

Hybrid system

A report by the Committee of Experts to the PSC on the views expressed by the public indicated that Kenyans did not favour the hybrid system of government. They said they wanted to directly elect whoever would wield executive authority.

Some ranking members of PSC were hostile to the hybrid proposal, describing it as “unworkable”. Support for the parliamentary system proposal appears to have waned in the course of the discussion and according to one source, the presidential model was suggested by an ODM Cabinet minister.

“The proposal garnered support from the PNU side and part of ODM and it was decided that we deal with the details in tomorrow’s session. This is a very substantial progress and we all very happy about it,” one member said on Wednesday night.

The proposed changes will be given to the Committee of Experts who will amend the draft and return it to Parliament for debate. The United States of America has a presidential system where the executive is checked by Parliament and an independent Judiciary.

In Naivasha, the MPs agreed that the president would chair a Cabinet appointed from outside Parliament in an effort to ensure that the powers of the Executive and Legislature are clearly demarcated. “There was also a feeling that the devolved governments should be strong enough to have proper checks on the Executive,” said one MP.

He also said there was a feeling in the committee that it was prudent to ensure that the president was not a member of Parliament. This means if one loses a presidential election, one has to wait for five years to be either in government or Parliament. The PSC is holding a week-long retreat to hammer out an agreement on contentious issues in the draft, mainly the chapter on the Executive.

The team also started discussions on devolution with some sources indicating that opinion tended to favour two tiers – national and regional. There were suggestions that the proposed 47 counties be restructured to come up with 30 regions. “The PSC sees three layers of devolution being too expensive to the economy,” one MP told the Nation.