How long would it take to
amend the new constitution?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
22 August 2010
Just when we thought that the constitutional debate was over, talk has
started about amending it; and some concern has been raised about how
long it would take to make a change.
Well, two routes are provided for: by parliamentary or by popular
initiative. In the parliamentary route, an amendment Bill can be tabled
in either of the two houses (Senate or National Assembly).
According to chapter 16 the Amendment Bill “shall not be called for second reading in either House within 90 days after the first reading of the Bill in that House”. Luckily, there is only one House of parliament at the moment, so we are only looking at three months.
After passing through
parliament, the Bill is forwarded to the President for assent. The
President is allowed a farther 30 days to sign and publish the Act. Thus
we can expect it to take four months (on the lower side) using this
route.
In the popular initiative route, a draft Bill is written by the promoter
of the amendment, for example the churches. It is then presented to the
Electoral Commission together with at least one million signatures in
support. That might seem very large, but, it can be achieved with about
250 supporters from each of the 4,000 churches in the country.
Unfortunately, there is no time limit for the signature verification
process, after certifying that there are enough supporters, the Bill is
distributed to all the county assemblies.
Since there are also no county assemblies at the moment, and their
functions have not been delegated to other body during the transition
period, we would have to wait until 2012 to proceed. Thus for anyone in
a hurry, the second route is not advisable.
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After reading last week’s column, Marcus Muli sent me this message: “I
wasn't convinced by last Sunday's FM transmission article. Here is my
version of why we have multiple frequencies in different regions for the
same media house.
“FM signals have a characteristic of fading with distance, that's why
they don't go very far as compared to AM signals. Therefore if Easy FM
wants its signals from
“If you put a transmitter and a receiver in close proximity and tune the
two on the same frequency, the signal you want to broadcast will be
recurring between the two because the receiver will immediately pick the
transmitted signal and feed it back to the transmitter (that will also
damage the receiver because of excessive RF input signal), that is why
you must have a different frequency to solve that problem.”
Well, what can say? His explanition is more convincing than mine.
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