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{
    "id": 1046158,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1046158/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 149,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Ndwiga",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 278,
        "legal_name": "Peter Njeru Ndwiga",
        "slug": "peter-ndwiga"
    },
    "content": "things, how can we get different results? We will continue living in perpetual poverty until we change our mindset. We first of all have to change our political thinking. We politicians behave as if the country does not belong to us. Who is telling our young people today that they can go out there and grow mung beans or any other agricultural produce which we can do value addition and consume locally? Sen. Sakaja spoke about sunflower. However, we are unable to even feed our own cows in Kenya to produce better milk. We have to import ingredients which include sunflower cake from Uganda. Are we crazy? What is happening to us? We cannot keep referring to Kenya as being an agricultural country yet we do nothing about investing in that agriculture. My Committee of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries had a session with the Council of Governors (CoG) in Mombasa to discuss issues affecting the agriculture sector. We asked all the counties what percentage of their funds they have invested in agriculture and their response shocked us. If the county governments are not remitting the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) contributions, what do you think they would allocate to agriculture? As a country, we need to be focused. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, we have passed a number of Bills concerning the agriculture sector, including the Tea Bill that we passed late last year. However, if you look at other countries that are tea producers, you will realize that India is the biggest producer, but they consume a lot of what they produce locally. Sri Lanka, which neighbors India, is also a big producer of tea. However, they do not export their tea in raw form. We have to wake up and move to the direction of value addition. I challenge us, as a country, to embrace value addition in the agriculture sector because the world is waiting. I am a big supporter of African Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) because even without thinking about what we are going to feed ‘ muzungus ’, we can send mung beans to very many other corners of Africa. We do not think about cross border trade and our own trade. If we traded amongst ourselves as African countries, we would be respected by everybody else in the world. However, we do not do that because we think that the only place we can sell our goods is in Europe or Asia. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I support this Bill as the Chairperson of the Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries. We should change our mindset about subsistence farming. If you have a peasant farmer in Kitui who has produced five bags of mung beans, it is clear that they cannot consume all the five bags. We must begin to think that agriculture is a business like any other. We mist design ways to introduce our children and the young people in this country to agriculture. However, for us to do that, we must make it interesting and gainful. I personally believe and know that agriculture pays. I have been farming since I was young so I know that agriculture pays if you focus. If you go to Kabete where we train agriculturalists, you will be amazed by the beautiful ideas that ooze out of their mouths. We have such educated agriculturalist in this country, but are we making use of them? It is time we changed our focus to stop thinking about producing for our own consumption without adding any value."
}