‘Mt. Kenya people were never behind BBI,’ confesses Governor Waiguru

The Mt Kenya region was never behind the push for constitutional amendments through the BBI Bill according to Governor Anne Waiguru. 

The Kirinyaga County boss who was speaking during an interview with Citizen TV’s Day Break on Wednesday said the polls and reactions done nationally showed that the people had been left behind in the quest to pass the Bill. 

While the contents of the BBI were a bag of goodies for the electorate, according to Governor Waiguru, the Bill was not supported by a majority.

“Looking at the reactions, and the polls done nationally, we seem to have left the people behind in the quest to pass BBI…I would be dishonest to say that the people of Mt Kenya were behind BBI. They were not,” Governor Waiguru said on Wednesday. 

Governor Waiguru was reacting to a tweet in which she called for introspection after the Appellate court upheld an earlier ruling by the High Court that had declared the Bill unlawful. 

“We have been on the constitutional amendment journey for 2 years & then we hit a dead end,” Governor Waiguru added “Any serious leader would then have to sit down and think where we went wrong…That is what I meant by ‘introspection’ in my Tweet,” 

Governor Waiguru believes that the BBI bill’s collapse requires a thorough examination of what went wrong with the Bill that had been hailed as the long-awaited panacea to Kenya’s long-standing problems.

“The way I’m wired is, we need to sit back and ask myself, what went wrong? Because if we were right we should have succeeded,” Governor Waiguru added. “Also politically, you need to ask yourself, if you are trying to do something good for the people and the people are not moving with you is there something that you did wrong in that engagement?”

In late August,  a seven-judge bench of the Court of Appeal brought an end to the much-hyped BBI reggae after upholding a High Court ruling that declared the BBI as unconstitutional.

The Appellate Court in a majority ruling held that the President cannot initiate Constitutional change through popular initiative because he does not fall under category of the ‘general public’.

“The Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill, 2020 is unconstitutional and a usurpation of the People’s exercise of sovereign power,” ruled the court.