Senior Counsel Otiende Amollo, on day two of the submissions at the Court of Appeal, asserted that the High Court erred in its judgment on the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) promoters.
Amollo, appearing for BBI Secretariat majorly questioned the role of a promoter in a popular initiative, one of the issues at the heart of the BBI hearing.
The advocate faulted High Court’s judgement finding President Uhuru Kenyatta as a key promoter when it was BBI Secretariat Co-Chair Dennis Waweru and National Assembly Minority Whip Junet Mohammed.
“Against all uncontroverted evidence, the promoters of this initiative were Dennis Waweru and Junet Mohamed. The court insists on finding President Kenyatta as the promoter. Anyone can support the initiative,” he told the Appellate court judges.
Omollo said that the Independent Commission (IEBC) had accepted Waweru and Junet as the promoters of the Bill, and not anyone else.
“They were authorized to collect signatures, which they did,” he argued.
Lawyer Amollo also argued that the High Court coined another term- initiator- when delivering its judgement in May.
“There is no such word as an initiator in article 257. There is only promoters and supporters,” he said, adding that nothing in law stops the President from initiating a popular initiative process to amend the Constitution.
Amollo said that only the people had the power to decide whether a popular initiative such as this should become law and not the president.
On the question of signature verification, the lawyer argued that IEBC was supposed to verify one million registered voters and not one million signatures.
“You cannot place undue substance on the question of signatures when in the first place, the law does not require every Kenyan to have a signature, neither a repository of signatures,” he said.
Yesterday, the Attorney General, in a nine-point attack of the High Court judgment, claimed the judges turned the BBI case into a personalised attack on President Uhuru Kenyatta, thus ending up with a wrong decision that overturned the people’s sovereign power to determine their political and governance destiny.
The AG’s counsel led by Senior Counsel George Oraro call to the seven Appellate Judges was to “let the people decide” the fate of the BBI Constitutional Amendment Bill through a referendum.
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