Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 1119264,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1119264/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 341,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Sakaja",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13131,
        "legal_name": "Johnson Arthur Sakaja",
        "slug": "johnson-arthur-sakaja"
    },
    "content": "Senators, the Madam Deputy Speaker is fair. I rise to speak to this Report that was ably and passionately moved by the Chairperson of the Committee on Finance and Budget, who is also the Senator for Kirinyaga County. I am sure if he did not have guests tomorrow in his county, he would have been more passionate. Since he has state guests, he has been careful about this Report. Does this country have a debt problem? For a long time, I have held that we have a deficit problem, which creates the debt issues. I am sure the Committee on Finance and Budget received a presentation from the Parliamentary Budget Office that spoke to the correlation of our deficit with the debt levels. We have poor forecasting of revenue and we do big budgets. Because of the big budgets which are big versus what we collect, we have huge deficits that are plugged with this debt. We have a deficit problem which must be addressed. We have a conflict of interest in the National Assembly because they have come to fall in love with big budgets. The reason they are in love with big budgets is because National Government Constituencies Development Fund (NG-CDF) is 2.5 per cent of the budget. The bigger the budget, the more the NG-CDF. The bigger the budget, the less the revenue; the greater the deficit, then the bigger the loans. This is the problem we are in. All efforts to deal with this, because the Chairperson has taken us through a lot of details--- Many indicators of an economic nature, and I do not want to get too technical, to put it simply, based on this Report, debt servicing in this country monthly is Kshs72 billion. It was Kshs50 billion which is crazy, but now it is Kshs72 billion. On top of that, operations and maintenance in the national Government is another Kshs50 billion. Salaries and pensions come to Kshs46 billion monthly. The pensions bill is going up because of the great number of Kenyans within Government"
}