Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 1127062,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1127062/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 541,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nambale, ANC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Sakwa Bunyasi",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2511,
        "legal_name": "John Sakwa Bunyasi",
        "slug": "john-sakwa-bunyasi"
    },
    "content": "As a House, we have the big responsibility of looking inward at the reflections from mirrors on our walls and not yonder and say, “Those are the guys.” Doing so would be pointing fingers at others. As they say, as you point one finger at somebody, at least three fingers of your own palm will be pointing at you. We must take an honest reckoning of where we are. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, this idea of grants is great. They are targeted grants. If there is failure of oversight, we should also take the blame. We should strengthen the Office of the Auditor-General (OAG). When they come for budget allocation, there is usually a lot of wavering and we continuously cut their requests. We worry about the amount they were allocated the previous year. We also tell them that they are not the only ones who need more money. It is a fact that they need more money. It is about the Judiciary. We have slashed them thin yet without those institutions, we cannot move on regarding issues of corruption and what the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) should do. The DPP only seems to be active when State House barks. After a while, all the drama around the arrests go silent. There are institutions that are meant to handle these issues well. Let us not mess up with the wonderful restructuring of governance by the current Constitution in terms of the devolved units. Let us fix the malpractices that are giving a bad name to devolution. In counties like Busia, we begun to see development only after devolution. The rest of it was just a little thing that you got in a long while. For example, courtesy of devolution, I was to have eight kilometres of tarmac road running through my constituency from Bungoma County. It has been two-and-a-half years since the project was commissioned but the contractor is off-site. He claims that he is not being paid and that his bills are now pending. The other day, he was told that the pending bills were waiting for audit verification. He has done legitimate work. He is not being challenged for submitting an erroneous bill. He has been told that he has to wait for the auditors to complete the audit. That could be a time-buying tactic by the Government simply because the National Treasury does not have the money to pay or the money is going elsewhere. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I was recently following some discussion where pressure was being mounted on His Excellency the President by people from his home region. He was accused of not having done much for his region. Those who were in support of the President came up with some statistics, which I trust. They said the President had done a lot. In the Central Region alone, a sum of Kshs540 billion has been put into road construction. I asked, “Kshs540 billion in one region?” That was in defence. The other day I heard two Members of Parliament discussing about supply of electricity in their respective constituencies. While one Member said his constituency was at 99 per cent connectivity, the other said his constituency was still at 96 per cent connectivity. I asked myself whether I was in the same Republic with them."
}