All eyes on Speaker Ethuro in fight to keep Senate safe from ‘predatory MPs’

By JULIUS SIGEI jsigei@ke.nationmedia.com' Saturday, June 15  2013

In Summary

• What started as a quarrel over which House is superior followed by the standoff over the Division of Revenue Bill, has escalated into total war with Kiharu MP Irungu Kang’ata vowing to bring a Constitutional Amendment Bill that would seek to abolish the Senate.

It had been billed as the Upper House, with Members of Parliament who felt they had outgrown the National Assembly jostling to join it in the run-up to the March 4 General Election. In fact, it is the only institution that can impeach the President. The size of the electoral area – a county often with many constituencies – further raised its clout.

But barely three months after elections, which ushered in the realities of the 2010 Constitution, the Senate, one of the creatures of the new dispensation, is fighting to stay afloat with some members of the National Assembly plotting to scrap it.

What started as a quarrel over which House is superior followed by the standoff over the Division of Revenue Bill, has escalated into total war with Kiharu MP Irungu Kang’ata vowing to bring a Constitutional Amendment Bill that would seek to abolish the Senate.

It is believed many MPs would gleefully support the Motion, even though it would require a referendum to effect the resolution.

Matters have not been helped by President Uhuru Kenyatta’s assention to the Bill last week, a move senators saw as diminishing the stature of their House in the public eye.

Shadows of the predicament of its predecessor are hanging over the current Senate, with supporters fearing it could go the way of the former whose life was snapped out by the Seventh Constitutional Amendment of December 1966.

“The Senate had been designed as a brake on government excesses. But in practice its impact was minimal. The government ignored most of the Motions while the House of Representatives (read National Assembly) defined virtually every Bill in terms of ‘money Bill’ and refused to accept Senate amendments,” writes Charles Hornsby in Kenya: A History Since Independence, published last year.

Senators are now caught up in the battle of a lifetime, fighting off charges that theirs is a superfluous office. The 67 senators – 47 elected and 20 nominated – now look up to Speaker Ekwe Ethuro to lead the onslaught in defence of the Senate.

But just who is this man, whose first name, Ekwe, means Dik Dik, and whose the second, Ethuro, means Fox? Would the attributes of these two animals serve him well in the epic battle in his hands?

An only child of a traditional chief, the former Temporary Speaker in the 10th Parliament says he has been fighting all his life and that he would fight to the hilt for the dignity of the Senate.

“I have spoken against everything I consider improper and fought for space right from my days at Kalokol Primary School to my time at the University of Nairobi where I was a class representative since year one, and culminating in my chairing all class reps in 1987,” he told Sunday Nation at his Kenyatta International Conference Centre office.

Mr Ethuro, who turns 50 on December 31, joined the University of Nairobi in 1985 and there were only two of them from his county.

“I would joke that if you expel one of us you will have kicked out 50 per cent of Turkana students from the university,” he said.

Wading into the row over pay, he questioned how a Senator could earn the same salary as an MP.

“Look at the case of a Nairobi senator, for instance, with 17 parliamentary constituencies. How should he earn the same salary as one of those MPs in his county?” asked one of the pioneer social scientists at the Kenya Africa Research Institute, and a former deputy country director at Oxfam.

“It is really not a healthy debate because the role of the Senate the world over is a bit more elevated than the National Assembly. But I think also the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate this sibling rivalry,” he continued.
Quite a part of pay and supremacy tussles, Mr Ethuro has also been grappling with office space for senators. “Perhaps they had anticipated that a nomad would head the Senate so we have not got a permanent place. Meanwhile we have now taken over six floors, from third to sixth (of the KICC). Members are now reasonably comfortable,” says the alumni of Alliance High School and a holder of Masters degree from Clemson University in the US.
He said the two Houses of Parliament were interdependent and nobody should wish the other away.

Saturday, Mr Ethuro hosted more than 30 senators at his home-coming, a function which also turned out to be a platform on which senators sought to rally public support to their side in the fight for survival.

He walks a tight rope given he has to juggle between party loyalty and political survival instinct. While he is expected to side with the senators who elected him, it must have been for him a delicate balancing act yesterday given the presence of Deputy President William Ruto who is his party leader.