Did MPs in Legal Affairs team create wards for themselves?

• The debate on the new electoral boundaries is expected to generate heat in Parliament following allegations that some members of the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee might have carved out county wards in their constituencies to serve their political and community interests.
• The boundaries storm gathers as MPs take a fresh look at the mandate of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.
• The question of independence of the commission vis-à-vis the requirement that it should prepare the final report “taking into account” proposals from Parliament is one of the key points of disagreement among lawmakers.

MPs in the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee will on Tuesday face questions in Parliament over their apparent push to skew the review of electoral boundaries in their favour.

Mr Abdikadir Mohammed (Mandera Central), Isaac Ruto (Chepalungu), Sofia Abdi Noor (nominated), Millie Odhiambo (nominated), Ababu Namwamba (Budalang’i) and Olago Aluoch (Kisumu Town West) will have to respond to accusations of “manipulating the work of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission” to serve their interests.

These six MPs have made their colleagues uneasy about the delimitation exercise.

“Members are at war that the committee, whose role should just be to look and table “yes” or “no” to the report from the IEBC, are already changing the boundaries,” Mr Jakoyo Midiwo (Gem) told his colleagues on Wednesday as he blew the lid off in the work of the committee.

A look at the complaints that the MPs raised informally with the committee members, to which the Sunday Nation is privy, shows that the disgruntled MPs have a case.

Ms Noor, a nominated MP, comes from Ijara Constituency in Garissa County. She wields clout in the area as the executive chairperson of ODM.

So, the fact that the committee has proposed four new wards for Ijara – a constituency with just 92,663 people and an area of 9,521 square kilometres – is an obvious pointer.

The House team got seven petitions from Ijara. All the seven wanted extra wards, an extra constituency, and they wanted the border between Garissa and Tana River counties to be the Tana River.

Save for the extra constituency, which under the law the House committee has no powers to grant, the other requests, including the one on county borders, were granted.

“In view of other constitutional criteria, including community of interest, geographical features, means of communication and land mass, Ijara should be considered for extra wards on a special case basis,” the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee declared in its report scheduled for debate on Tuesday.

The revocation of the three-mile strip on the border between Garissa and Tana River is also one of the curious proposals that the committee has made.

Ms Noor is on record as pushing for this, and the declaration in the committee report that “The western border of Ijara Constituency shall be the Tana River” has her fingerprints all over it.

Neighbouring Fafi is a larger constituency both in population (3,000 more people than Ijara) and area (surpassing Ijara by 6,000 square kilometres), but it wasn’t considered for an extra ward. All the MPs proposed was a “realignment of ward boundaries”.

Mr Ruto of Chepalungu in Bomet County also has to tell his colleagues why his constituency deserved an extra ward in Sigor Division “to cater for municipality and ensure all wards have a balanced population”.

Chepalungu has 163,833 people. The IEBC divided it into five wards.

The rationale for an extra ward, when the current five have a population threshold well within the legal limits that the IEBC used, is a query that Mr Ruto may find hard to answer.

But Mr Ruto told the Sunday Nation that there was no malfeasance in the way the committee had done its job.

“We could not increase the number of constituencies because the Constitution puts a limit at 290. (DOWNLOAD: Preliminary Report of The Proposed Boundaries of Constituencies)