Sudi among 19 MPs who never spoke in Parliament – report
A Parliamentary scorecard by Mzalendo has exposed 19 MPs who never contributed to any debate in the National Assembly for the year 2024.
Mzalendo is a Kenyan non-partisan Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation (PMO) that promotes open, inclusive and accountable Parliaments across Kenya and Africa.
According to the scorecard, Kapseret MP Oscar Sudi and his Makadara counterpart George Aladwa yet again featured in the list of those who did not contribute to debates in the house.
Of the 19 listed, the UDA party led with 10 MPs, the ODM party had four members, ANC had two, Wiper had one, DAP-K one and Jubilee party one.
Other members on the list are Rongo MP Paul Abuoro (ODM), Hamisi MP Charles Gumini (ANC), Kuresoi South MP Joseph Tonui (UDA), Kuria West MP Mathia Nyamabe (UDA), Subukia MP Samuel Gachobe (UDA) and Bahati MP Irene Njoki (Jubilee Party)
Mzalendo noted that the MPs were least vocal in expressing public/ constituent views and debating issues of local and national importance, which as representatives is one of the core and vital mandates of parliamentarians.
The performance was exclusively determined by the number of times individual MPs speak in Parliament (speech counts) and as captured in the Parliamentary Hansard, the official Parliamentary record.
“Upon collation of all the Hansards for a particular session a calendar year from February to December-the speech counts for each member are generated by Mzalendo’s word-scraper which captures the speech frequencies based on the Hansard entries,” Mzalendo said.
“To ensure that we only rank based on substantive contributions, we also do a manual verification of the Hansard entries to ascertain the automatically generated counts. The information is also automatically generated on our website in a cumulative manner.”
The rankings cover only plenary proceedings, whose information is readily available to the public.
“Information on committees’ proceedings is not as readily available. The limited access thus makes it hard to incorporate them into the rankings,” Mzalendo stated in its report.
The Parliamentary Scorecard is an annual ranking of performance by the Members of Parliament (MPs)-both the National Assembly and the Senate.
First published in 2014, the ranking is strictly based on the performance of the MPs inside the Parliament and more specifically in the plenary.
