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{
    "id": 1095097,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1095097/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 213,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kikuyu, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Kimani Ichung’wah",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1835,
        "legal_name": "Anthony Kimani Ichung'Wah",
        "slug": "anthony-kimani-ichungwah"
    },
    "content": " Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, if you listened to me clearly, I was using it as an example of attempts by the Executive to use exemptions in the State Corporations Act like was done in the old KANU days. Probably, if you were being tutored by the KANU regime, that is why you see this inclination. I was speaking to Clause 24 which proposes to amend Section 34 of the Act to mandate the NHIF Board to invest in the procurement and acquisition of essential medical equipment and supportive infrastructure to empanel concerted healthcare providers. People who are empanelled or contracted by the NHIF as service providers are both public and private healthcare providers. If we give the board mandate to procure healthcare equipment, and not healthcare for a hospital that is being managed by that board, you remember sometime back the Board was involved in some scandal of land where they were to build a referral hospital in Karen, which to date, despite spending billions of shillings, has never been built. Consultants walked away with billions of shillings. I am, therefore, very sceptical when you tell me that the NHIF that could not invest in a referral hospital, a referral hospital that an institution like Kenyatta University was able to invest in and build in a period of about three to four years and which has been very critical during the COVID-19 period to help ease congestion at the Kenyatta National Hospital and other private hospitals. It is a very good hospital. The NHIF had that dream over 15 years ago. It has never come to fruition. It is the same NHIF that you are mandating to procure healthcare equipment. Is it the same healthcare equipment that we attempted to procure through the infamous Managed Equipment Services (MES) programme that came into being in 2014? If that is what we are to learn from, then we must be cautious. We should not pass legislation to mandate the NHIF to go ahead and procure more equipment while we have the MES equipment lying in sub-county and county referral hospitals and not in use, forcing our county governments to pay billions of shillings every year to providers of these leased equipment. We want to use the NHIF to squander more public resources by getting the same tenderpreneurs who were involved in the MES programme. You can bet the same tenderpreneurs who were involved in the MES scandal are the same ones who were involved in the COVID-19 KEMSA billionaires scandal. It is the same tenderpreneurs that we are probably opening up new avenues for to engage in procurement of healthcare equipment. Of course, you know there are those few who have now specialised in procurement of healthcare equipment in this country. You have seen them even building hospitals across Nairobi."
}