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{
    "id": 1031326,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1031326/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 281,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Dagoretti South, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. John Kiarie",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13322,
        "legal_name": "John Kiarie Waweru",
        "slug": "john-kiarie-waweru"
    },
    "content": "Members of Parliament, some of who are medical doctors, and others who have a background in activism on issues to do with the women and girls in this country. We have gotten some very good cultural accounts, some which are for and some which are against. The most interesting of them is the cultural account that we are getting from the Kamba people, who are telling us that, instead of cutting they have decided to actually enhance it for the pleasure of the female gender. That is because if men are enjoying this act, even the females ought to be enjoying. We have also gotten some very historical accounts of a patriarchal community, patriarchal communities that want to lord over their women and, unjustly so. We have also gotten some spiritual accounts. Most importantly, we have heard some very moving personal accounts this afternoon. So, it would be in order for me not to go back to where we have been taken through the whole of this afternoon and just start charting a new path. The new path we should be looking at is the path to zero cases of FGM in this country. The path to zero cases can be informed by models that exist. The models that I am talking about have been tried and tested and they are models of behavioural change. If this is a habit; if this is a cultural practice; if this is a behaviour that has been taken up by cultures in this country, then there must be an existing model on how to change the behaviour of people from where they are to where they can go. I want to offer a model we can borrow from. When the colonialists came to this country, they had a religion that they wanted to impart upon our people. Most of them were Christians. For them to make this country a Christian nation, they adopted a model that was very effective. What they did is that they decided the older people of the society would die through natural attrition. So, they did not even seek to teach the older people about the new religion that they were offering the Africans. What they did is that they opened Sunday schools. It is in these Sunday schools that indoctrination used to happen. In a very short time, in fact in less than a generation, a whole continent had been converted to Christianity."
}