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"content": "should be geared towards development. I am glad that now we are having a candid conversation to see how we spent or squandered the money. Even in a family, assuming the head of the family is a man because even a woman can head a family, if the man, who is charged with family land took a loan of Kshs1 million and bought a tractor to till the land to increase productivity, I think that would be a bright decision that all members of the family would support. However, we have seen cases where a man gets Kshs1 million from a bank and decides to marry another wife or rent a house in the nearby town, so that he can be drinking tea and mandazi every morning. Those adventures rarely go beyond six months because if you decide to spend with the girls found in towns, do tea and chapatis in towns and drink whiskeys in the evening, Kshs1 million will not be there in six months, but you will have to pay it. That is what we did with the Eurobond. We acted like an irresponsible father who took a loan so as to get money to treat his mistresses and do funny things at night. If we had spent that money on Galana- Kulalu, today we would not be talking of food insecurity. If we spent that money on housing, today we would not be talking of the crisis that this country faces as far as housing is concerned. That is where the rain started beating us. The deficits that we have in our budget are avoidable. There is no point of coming up with budgets that are not balanced when we know that if we dealt with wastage, corruption, task avoidance and tax evasion, that deficit would not be there. There are countries that have got a very disciplined approach to their budgets. For some of them, it is a constitutional position that there should be no budget deficit. Therefore, they always strike to have a balanced budget. That means that their expenditure and revenue streams must match. In this country, we take pride in the size of our budget. We are happy that we have got a Kshs3 trillion budget and we are laughing at our neighbours Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda that their budgets are small. It is like two boys out in the field passing urine and comparing their abilities. Having a Kshs3 trillion budget should only give us confidence if we have an equivalent revenue stream, but consistent budget deficits makes us borrow in ways that are not sustainable. The next Government must deal with the issue of tax avoidance and tax evasion. It is time for us to review our tax code and make sure that taxation targets those people who have the ability and are making profits out of this economy and not those who are suffering like paraffin, petrol users and boda boda riders. The most vulnerable, unfortunately, we have always wanted to lump taxes on the majority thinking that the more people who pay tax the more tax revenues we shall get. We do not realize what other countries are doing. We need to look at our high net worth individuals without making the cost of business too high. There are people who through transfer pricing, tax evasion, avoidance and creativity in accounting are not paying the taxes that they are supposed to, yet a boda boda rider and at every point when a matatu is ignited there is money that goes to the Government in the form of petroleum taxes."
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