National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale has announced that he is headed to the Supreme Court in a bid to end once and for all the supremacy wars between Parliament and the Senate.
MPs who backed the move stated that it had become necessary to get an advisory opinion on the mandate of each House so as to draw the line.
“Time has come for the National Assembly to return to Supreme Court. There is confusion in the legislative work and this line ought to be drawn so that the Senate knows its work,” Duale stated at the post-election induction conference in Mombasa on Tuesday.
Members of Parliament also demanded an immediate meeting between Senate Speaker Ken Lusaka and his National Assembly counterpart Justin Muturi to resolve constant squabbles over who should undertake specific legislative roles.
Since the 2013 General Election which was the first to be conducted under the 2010 constitution, members of the National Assembly and the Senate have clashed several times over which House is superior, with both sides accusing the other of encroaching on their mandate.
[caption caption="Former Committee of Experts (CoE) Chair Nzamba Kitonga"]
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Duale, for instance, has questioned the role of the Senate in the Division of Revenue Bill and their decision to create the Committees of Defence and Foreign Relations, arguing that national security matters are exclusive functions of the national government.
Former Committee of Experts (CoE) Chairman Nzamba Kitonga told the lawmakers that the 2010 constitution was drafted with an all-powerful Senate, but this changed once the document was sent to the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) that met in Naivasha to synthesise it.
“It is the PSC that came back from Naivasha with the architecture of the Senate we have today. To save it from embarrassment we developed a Mediation Committee system to place it at par with the National Assembly,” Kitonga explained.
Rarieda MP Otiende Amollo, who was also part of the CoE, explained that the current system was a compromise between those who wanted a purely presidential system and those who championed total devolution.
“What we got from Naivasha was a skeleton of a House in the name of Senate. That is why we decided to remove ranking of which House was upper or lower,” he noted.
Muturi argued that much of the conflict stemmed from lack of concurrence on bills that required the consensus of either House as required under Article 112 of the Constitution, especially the Division of Revenues Bill.
[caption caption="Rarieda MP Otiende Amollo"]
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