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The Parliamentary Select Committee on Constitution Review (PSC) has agreed on an additional 90 parliamentary seats to the current 222 in the quest for fair representation.

Reports indicate that the Committee on Tuesday evening passed a resolution to increase the number but was stuck on the criteria to delimit new constituencies and add nominated members.

The Committee resumed negotiations on Wednesday morning to sort out the criteria in its third day of the weeklong retreat. Speaking on Tuesday as the discussions went on, PSC Chairman Abdikadir Mohammed assured that the criteria to be adopted would balance off constituency sizes with the population density.

“Our guiding principle is to be fair so that there is adequate and fair representation to those areas that are heavily populated and those that are vast and sparsely populated,” he said.

Members of Parliament from the densely populated areas have on different occasions maintained that the units must be based on ‘one man one vote’ while their counterparts from the sparsely populated have insisted on ‘one kilometer one vote’ criteria.

“The two are not mutually exclusive. You could be fair to both without anybody feeling left out or unfairly treated,” Mr Mohammed said.

Currently there are 210 constituencies with 12 nominated members while the Speaker and the Attorney General are ex-officio members. A key factor in the criteria is how the nominated seats will be allocated to the political parties, a matter that has been in contention all along. There have been proposals to allocate special seats to women, the youth and persons with disabilities and all these need to be negotiated.

Later on Wednesday the PSC was expected to start discussions on the more contentious clause of the structure of the Executive.

While the Party of National Unity is pushing for a Presidential system with ‘checks and balances’ the Orange Democratic Movement insists on a Parliamentary system of governance.

Both parties have dismissed the compromise hybrid system proposed by the Committee of Experts on Constitution Review.

Earlier on Tuesday, the PSC yielded to public pressure to seal the ‘loophole that could give gay marriages a legal lifeline.’ The proposed draft had stated that “every adult has the right to found a family” raising eyebrows especially from religious leaders who had threatened to reject the document saying this was a Western ideal.

The team spent much of its second day debating the Bill of Rights which is the fifth Chapter. Reports indicated that the committee deleted close to half of the chapter claiming “the Committee of Experts was influenced by the civil society.”

Attempts to entrench the Human Rights and Gender Commission in the Constitution were also thwarted as the team deleted any mention of the institution in this chapter. The retreat is meant to arrive at a compromise on the contentious issues and emerge with a document that will be acceptable to MPs in Parliament and Kenyans at the referendum.