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{
    "id": 675749,
    "url": "http://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/675749/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 272,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Eng.) Gumbo",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 24,
        "legal_name": "Nicholas Gumbo",
        "slug": "nicholas-gumbo"
    },
    "content": "coalition were withdrawn from the Departmental Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs. We are now going back. As Hon. Midiwo said, the image we portray is important. A while ago, I brought up the matter of education levels and why the Committee on Appointments should insist on education standards for the people they are vetting when some of them do not have those standards. It saddened me that as we were doing that, students were sitting in the gallery. The impression we gave is that education is not important. That is a wrong message. Wherever we go, we spend most of our time in schools. The reason we go to those schools is to tell our young people that education is so important. This is not vanity. Some of the most successful countries in the world begin by imparting quality education to their people. I have spoken to it before and I will speak to it again. Some of the leaders that I admire greatly are the late Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and the current Prime Minister of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Among some of the greatest speeches that those two leaders have given have to do with education. In fact, in Mr. Al Maktoum’s book Flashes of Thought, he says categorically that if you want to live well for a year, grow wheat; if you want to live well for 10 years, grow trees; but if you want to live well for centuries, grow people through education. It would be vanity for us, as leaders of this nation to speak, especially in the presence of our small children and try to make it look like education is not important. It is true that the world has seen very great leaders such as Winston Churchill and even the 16th President of the United States of America (USA), Abraham Lincoln, who did not have that much formal education, but they had leadership qualities. What we say in this House as leaders matters. Only recently, I got a message from a boy in one of the schools in my constituency. He told me that when he joined the leading school in my constituency, he was an average student. However, he heard my story about my struggles of how I went to Cardinal Otunga Boys High School, left that school without shoes and still managed to become a leading engineer in this country. He told me that from relating my testimony about what I had gone through in life, he decided that he wanted to be an engineer and move from being a below average student to an “A” student. I am happy to report that as I speak, and due to that motivation, that boy is in the group of those who are joining the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nairobi (UoN) this year. It is true that we all cannot be the same just like our fingers cannot be of the same length, but let us not at all times make remarks that tend to imply education is not important in our life. Hon. Speaker, it has empirically been proved that the number of years citizens of a country spend pursuing education on average equates to the development of that nation. If you go to Japan, the number of years Japanese spend in education in primary, secondary, universities and tertiary institutions is higher than Kenyans and it follows that they are more developed. It is good we have had these healthy exchanges. Some of them amounted to a comic break. Nevertheless, I hope we will be productive as we reconstitute this Committee. I watched the debate by my friend, Hon. Waiganjo, on Cheche this morning. He raised some very good issues on what the Departmental Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs is supposed to do and its position as a Departmental Committee in this House to move some important agenda of this country forward. I encourage my colleagues going into this Committee to know that they are sitting on the crest of a historical moment. They should seize it and let our country move forward. I believe there is folly of war and confrontation. People have to sit and agree for them to move forward. One may ask why we did not sit down and agree before all this. We have seen the acrimony that The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}