verbatim report of constituency public hearings ... - ConstitutionNet

39Com. Bishop Bernard Njoroge Sawa. Tumepata hiyo.Githuka Muhia Okay. Sina maoni mengine.Com. Bishop Njoroge:Thank you. Hiyo ni maoni makubwa na mazuri. Onesmus Ngari?Onesmus Ngari: I had gone to check.. because I was the first person here. I had gone to check what had happened. Myname is Onesmus Ngari. My case here is a little different from what you have heard. Because everything has its bad side andgood side. I want to say the good side of the old Constitution. I had only two points to advise. Or in my case, I just want toreview and propose and make my observations which is: we had a Constitution,-The Lancaster House Constitution, and therewas nothing wrong with it but it was messed up by a few things that I want to mention here. It may help to make up the newConstitution that these things should be marked and never be repeated. Because we will not be doing a very good exercise ifwe have to repeat what went wrong. These two points were: immediately after Kenya reverted to become a republic and theGovernor general had left, the Constitution, which we had, was more or else almost suspended. Then a sort of syndrome wascreated, where by a “Mzee amesema”came into being and it has really changed everything up to now. It has not ceased to bethe measure of what is going to be ruled in Kenya. That is one of the points.Another point is that the same thing killed the bicameral Parliament. With all its supremacy, it was crashed and it was no more.Parliament members became mere individuals. Another thing that went ahead is the discipline of the Civil Service. I have madeup a point there, that Civil servants were considered with what was then known as ‘Ndegwa report’. Which completely erodedthe discipline of the system of the Civil Service system which we had known or we had inherited from the Colonial Government.Which were very honest and such like. Especially on financial side.Another thing I have here for you to look into is the freedom. I think no freedom is absolute. Lawyers know that. No freedom isabsolute. Now the freedom of worship which is… am very particular about that. Freedom of worship. You cannot haveeverybody with all corruption we have in Kenya, getting a license to start going about saying this or that or the next. Thefreedom of worship must be safeguarded because we have…as somebody else said there before. We have to respect God.My last point is the freedom of Association which mostly handles the situation of these parties. Parties are formed fromnowhere. For no reason at all. Somebody is sacked from the Parliament, tomorrow he forms up a Party. I suggest as we havedone in Nigeria, Political parties to be restricted to three. Somebody mentioned that three. That has to be included in theConstitution - That a political party must reflect a national outlook even moral has to be included in a party, so that we knoweverybody is there. Not a section. We have reached a stage whereby a political party represents nothing other than a clan.Which is now going to cause a lot of disunity among ourselves.The last one I would ask is that the Constitution we had, did not include referendum clause. Or what they call in Switzerland