Sunday, June 24, 2012

Mars Group Kenya Update: Parliament tells the Constitutional Court to keep off the Budget: Clearly Parliament believes it can break the Law with impunity.

Parliament tells the Constitutional Court to keep off the Budget: Clearly
Parliament believes it can break the Law with impunity.
It appears Kenya's National Assembly does not respect certain court judgements.
The National Assembly on Thursday June 21st 2012, shamelessly cast aside the
High Court of Kenya's constitutional interpretation of the correct and legal
procedure to access funds from the Consolidated Fund and proceeded to debate and
vote on giving the Executive access to half the 2012 budget without a statutory
basis. The Deputy Speaker's ruling ignored the ratio decedendi of the decision
of Justice Majanja in Petition 108 of 2011 delivered on 23rd December 2011 in
the case of Mati & Adieno vs. Attorney General & Minister of Finance. In our
humble opinion a contempt of court such as this requires urgent and punitive
remedy.

The verbal personal undertaking by the Finance Minister Minister Githae has been
accepted as sufficient to satisfy the National Assembly to authorize withdrawal
from the Consolidated Fund of over Kshs 424 billion.  This is despite the fact
that the National Assmebly, and the Deputy Speaker must be fully aware that
Article 206 of the Constitution of Kenya requires that withdrawals from the
Consoldited Fund must be based on written statute laws – in this case the
Approproation Bill.

The National Assembly has compounded the situation by proceeding, depite the
Attorney General and the Finance Minister both being parties in a constitutional
petition which settled the interpretation of the Constitution vis-a-vis the vote
on- account parliamentary procedure.  The decision went against both the
Attorney General and the Finance Minister.  Despite the Deputy Speaker’s 
claim in his ruling, and subsequent interventions, the decision was served on
all parties to the litigation.  Further, because there were no grounds, Justice
Majanja’s decision has never been appealed by either the Attorney General or
the Finance Minister.

It is not surprising that the Deputy Speaker chose to overturn a court decision
over a money issue.  The check and balance bewteen the Legislature and the
Executive over affairs of money has broken down.  The courts who have the other
sacred duty of opposing collusion can say nothing and the poor people of Kenya
bear the brunt of the conspiracy.....

Read the full post here: http://blog.marsgroupkenya.org/?p=3063  

Mars Group Kenya
Watching Out for You.

No comments:

Post a Comment