In what is seen as a scheme to derail referendum if not to floor BBI bill, the National Parliament has said they have a different bill from what counties unanimously passed.
The BBI push for a referendum seems dead on arrival after it emerged there exists varying BBI bills.
According to Paul Mwangi, a key drafter of the Bill said they presented only a single copy of the Bill to the IEBC that was to be transmitted to the 47 county assemblies—IEBC could only make copies of the bill without any alterations.
“This spooking proponents of the exercise who are now alleging a plot to derail the exercise. We have just moved from the last attempt of sabotaging BBI saying they were going to make amendments to the document, that has failed and to me this is a new attempt of trying to come up with a credible reason to sink BBI,” Mr Mwangi said.
On its part, IEBC distanced itself from any culpability saying they received printed copies of the BBI constitutional amendment bill and forwarded to the county assemblies without touching on the content of the bill!
The joint justice and legal affairs committee says it learnt that only 13 county assemblies debated and approved the correct BBI bill.
To make the matter more worse, the Bill at the National Assembly is at variance with the one at the Senate.
Take for instance, the second schedule in the national assembly’s document speaks article 89(7) but that of the senate is making reference to article 87(7)—this notwithstanding that the correct reference here was article 89(7)
It is also emerging that Nyamira County Assembly considered and approved the Bomas BBI draft—it took the realization of the Senate for the county assembly speaker to make amends and send the correct Bill.
“We would only start talking about a problem if speakers from various assemblies say they tabled the wrong document from IEBC or say they possibly made a mistake and tabled a foreign document which they have to explain where they got it from,” Mr Mwangi said
With these new developments its back to square one for the committee on whether to amend or not the BBI bill.
Experts tasked by the committee while ruling out amending the BBI bill said parliament could only correct typos or issues of form.
So, did the county assembly speakers receive the faked BBI bill?
If yes, from who? Who is this that altered the Bills that were passed enmasses by the counties?
