Disability is not Inability

:: Disability friendly Parliament Chambers.

The disability unfriendly parliamentary chamber is set for a 400 million refurbishement (down from the wopping 880 million last year, after cries of wasteage) to improve its seating arrangements and hopefully improve its firendliness to Members with disabilities.

Samuel Leshore who has a wheel chair has always wheeled himself to the corridor in the middle between the right and left seats. This obstructing the ceremonial march of either the Mace, the speaker or the president, and members.

The seating arrangment need to be renovated with ergonomic seats that would accomodate various body shapes and physical nature. Members with disabilities should also be effectively accomodated bot physically and communication wise. Speaker of the Kenyan parliament announcing the coming refurbishment of parliament to "make it disability friendly?!".

Kimunya factored into the budget these funds to facilitate the mordenisation and refurbishement of the debating chamber among other areas.

Among other things, the refurbishement entailed re-modelling of the chamber into a horse-shoe shape to do away with the existing adversarial sitting arrangement. It will also purchase facilities to cater for live coverage of the proceeding fully with sign language interpretations capabilities.

Additional Constituencies.

While there are proposed 70 new constituecies created from the additional districts the government created last year december, many Kenyans from the non geographical districts are up in arms for more representation in the next parliamnet fully with constituency benefits of budgetary allocations. The non geographic constituencies will include more nominated members representing persons with disabilities, women, youth and other interests.

Such constituencies should also be allocated CDF finances to cater for their specific needs and interests in building an inclusive society. Persons with disabilties communities for example will wish to see more Men and Women with disbailtiies accomodated fully in parliament and also provided with CDF (constituency development funds Kitty which was increased to 10 billion) funds to carry out projects in various geographical areas to empower their contituecies working in collaboration with geographical members of parliament.

This kind of funding could well be used to finance the adjustments required to enable inclusion in health, education and economic empowerment of disability communities coutrywide. This can only happen if nominated members are nominated to represent marginalised constituencies and they are provided with resources within the CDF framework.

:: Introduce sign Language, TV stations urged.