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{
    "id": 1047363,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1047363/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 346,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Tharaka, DP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. George Gitonga",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13491,
        "legal_name": "George Gitonga Murugara",
        "slug": "george-gitonga-murugara"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. Let me make my contribution to this particular policy paper bearing in mind that this is not the first one and I am 100 per cent sure it is not going to be the last one. Going back into history a little bit, we had all papers right from the time of the colonial government including the Devonshire White Paper of 1923 and its policy was that Kenya was a black man’s country and the interests of the black man were supreme. I can confirm that in fact nothing came out of that. From there after Independence we had the Sessional Paper No. 1 of 1966 which was on African socialism. Nothing came out of that apart from creating 10 millionaires and 10 million paupers. Even after that in the next regime we had what used to be called the District Focus for Rural Development, another paper similar to this. Everyone’s guess as to what came out of that is as good as mine. The only one that we saw which possibly had some results was the Vision 2030, another policy paper which for 10 years Hon. Mwai Kibaki was in power, actually we saw fruits towards realisation of that paper, but I cannot confirm how far we have gone in that because we are nine years to 2030. This is a good policy paper and if it is implemented by the Government, we are likely to turn around what we see in our tourism sector. Tourism is next after agriculture in terms of production to our economy. Therefore, it is vitally important that we actually emphasise and put a lot of thought on paper as regards how we can improve tourism. Wildlife is part of tourism. In fact, it is the bigger part of the tourism sector that brings tourists to this country. Therefore, we must at all times endeavour to ensure that our natural heritage, which is wildlife, is protected. We do this by having our national parks and game reserves, but the question we keep asking every day is who benefits the most from national parks and game reserves? How much do we get from these areas which are located in our various counties and how much goes to the national Government? This is what this policy paper should be addressing. Meru National Park is a national park which is bordering my constituency Tharaka. I can confess in this House, that we get almost no benefit by the virtue of having that national park bordering our constituency."
}