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<TITLE>KCA Ammendment, moving forward</TITLE>
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<FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Dear All,<BR>
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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.<BR>
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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.<BR>
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Kindest Regards<BR>
Harry <BR>
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