The allegations made by John Seii are shocking because we followed the same protocols that we had agreed on.
The protocol was always that after discussions, we would go for a retreat and reach a decision on every matter.
After that members sat with secretaries and experts to draft the report.
We then met and everybody confirmed the contents of the report were what had been agreed on. Then we signed it.
Before we submitted the report, we all met again, reread it and confirmed its contents; then it was given to the President.
We did not make decisions leaning towards one side of the country. We picked people from everyplace and ensured we had diverse regions.
You cannot say there were more people from a particular community. We had people from Northeastern, Eastern, Central, Nyanza, Coast and all regions.
During the interviews and hiring, we distributed posts to all communities and regions.
In the secretariat the only thing that changed was the administrator, who was removed. We had all regions. It was something we were very careful about.
I find the claim shocking because there can be nothing outrageous about what you signed.
I do not know what the purpose of making those allegations was. It looks like the purpose is to add on to the trashing of the report.
The issue of gender and additional MPs was a very big matter. We had two options, either ask for pro-rata distribution of numbers of the 290 constituencies. The cost of that was that we were going to disenfranchise 27 constituencies.
It would have meant reducing Lamu, a whole county into one constituency. Same for Isiolo, Marsabit, Othaya was also on the list of areas that would lose. We would not take away representation from people who are minorities.
It would be very wrong to take away a constituency from them to give it to a populous community.
But then, even the populous communities were crying because their representation is skewed. That is why we decided to use mixed member representation.
The country’s leadership never meddled in our work. From the very beginning, nobody ever interfered. These allegations were not there during the launch of the first report.
If there was to be interference, it would have been during the first report because the leadership would have wanted to capture the foundation of the recommendations.