[kictanet] KCA Ammendment, moving forward

[Harry Hare]

Dear All,

I think it will add a lot of value if people paused for a bit and spend
sometime to educate themselves on the clauses of the bill before commenting
on it. Making suggestions and comments based on inaccurate media reports
will not add value to this debate. I think what we are seeing is the
complexity of legislating in a converged environment. As much as
technologies have converged, the legal environment is yet to catch up and so
are the stakeholders. Those in the know have been advising that the bill has
too much scope and therefore too many stakeholders making it very difficult
to steer through with all the stakeholders maintaining interest and
therefore participate fully in the consultations. For instance, the ICT
stakeholders want the bill through because it makes sense to them, but not
our brothers and sisters from the forth estate.

So how do we move forward? I think, we need to convince our media colleagues
that there is no malice in the bill and they are not targeted. Let the
President sign the bill in its current form but agree on a programme for an
immediate amendment (just like the proposed programme on the e-Transactions
section), pulling out all the media/broadcast clauses into a separate bill.
So the sector will then have 3 separate bills, the Kenya Communication
Amendment Bill, the e-Transactions Bill and the Media Bill. The convergence
route is trendy and interesting but the reality at the moment is, we may not
be able to effectively engage all the stakeholders and have a law that cuts
across everything, which unfortunately is the nature of ICT.

Kindest Regards
Harry 

African eDevelopment Resource Centre
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