Africa-Press – Kenya. Embakasi East MP Babu Owino has revealed two key issues that led to the collapse of the Building Bridges Initiative constitutional amendment push.
According to the legislator, the failure of the BBI was by design, just like Raila Odinga’s fifth stab at the presidency.
Babu insists that Raila lost the presidency when BBI was stopped by the courts.
“Sometimes I tell myself that I ought not to have joined Raila’s campaign team if I had known the results. We made fundamental mistakes but they were by design because losing an election is not very easy, especially when you have the government on your side,” he told NTV in an interview.
“But we lost an election when we lost BBI if you ask me. All these others were just additional information about losing the election.”
The legislator said BBI failed the moment the office of the Ombudsman was introduced to oversight the judiciary and also the proposal to have an additional 70 constituencies.
This, he said, would have ballooned the country’s wage bill.
“The moment we introduced the Office of the Ombudsman to oversight the judiciary, we lost it. The person who brought it in knew that we would lose it at that moment because the judiciary would not pass something that is going to oversight them,” Babu stated.
“Number two was the introduction of the 70 extra constituencies that were going to increase the wage bill. The introduction was not well designed. It was supposed to be done purely by IEBC,” he added.
The MP noted that they had the backing of almost all political parties in the country as well as leaders, but when the courts stopped the BBI, the Raila and former President Uhuru Kenyatta-led side experienced a mass exodus.
This, he says, is when most leaders allied to them sided with President William Ruto who at the time was deputy president of the country.
Ruto had strongly campaigned against the BBI.
For More News And Analysis About Kenya Follow Africa-Press
