The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party has urged its members in the National Assembly to pass the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) document as it is.
This follows reports the document seeking to amend the Kenyan Constitution 2010 is riddled by mistakes seen to be causing divisions in Raila’s camp.
Kivumbi.co.ke understands that a section of Raila’s legal team led by Siaya Senator James Orengo was pushing for the document to be revised, a move that was seriously opposed by Raila’s legal adviser lawyer Paul Mwangi.
The division in Raila’s camp on whether to open the document for revision or not had escalated to the national assembly which is scheduled to debate on the Bill in the course of the week.
However, the party in a statement issued on Tuesday, April 27, urged its members not to make any corrections but instead pass the document the way it is.
“I called you here to make clear the position of the ODM on that Bill and to advise all our MPs to align themselves accordingly. It is the party’s position that parliament should pass the BBI Bill as it is, in its entirety,” the ODM party chairman John Mbadi said in a statement.
Mbadi said even though the document might have some minor typographic errors, there are some very important gains in the document that the party would not want to throw out just because it did not get everything right.
“ODM supporters have borne the brunt of election violence in this country. We know what happened in 2007, 2013 and 2017. BBI has some solid proposal on how to end the culture of election violence and the winner takes all brand of our politics,” the letter added.
Lawyer Paul Mwangi had earlier on argued that making amendments in the document will render it useless as the Bill will have to be send back to the County Assemblies to be debated on afresh.
