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"id": 1130068,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1130068/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Hon. Uhuru Kenyatta",
"speaker_title": "His Excellency the President",
"speaker": {
"id": 168,
"legal_name": "Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta",
"slug": "uhuru-kenyatta"
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"content": "19. Similarly, the county has developed a Universal Health Coverage Insurance scheme known as Makueni Care. And all this has been catalysed by our principle of resource percolation to the emerging county structures. Another example of county innovation is in Kajiado. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the county looked for a way of distributing food to hungry members of its populace. Through an integrated system dubbed M-Riziki, which virtually linked financiers and beneficiaries, 30,000 households of the population were able to receive food using the system in 2020. M-Riziki saved the county the logistical nightmare of transportation. The digital platform also ensured that shopkeepers who partnered with the county to provide goods worth Ksh1,500 per person remained in business during the COVID duress. This innovative approach to distributing relief food closed off avenues of corruption, and created efficient ways of delivering services to the indigent. There are many more testimonies as to how accelerating the formation of county structures and supporting them with skilled personnel, resources and legislation has embedded devolution in the last 8 years. Once sleepy towns, have now been roared into life, driving not just grand infrastructure developments but also tangible increase in household incomes of ordinary Kenyans. As devolution takes root, and as an affirmation of the equitable development we continue to enjoy, and in keeping with the resolution of the Senate; I will tomorrow, 1st December 2021, have the high privilege of conferring on Nakuru Municipality with City Status. Nakuru City will join Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nairobi as cities. With a reputation as East Africa’s cleanest town, all of Kenya looks forward to Nakuru City growing by leaps and bounds. I am happy to report to these august Houses that my administration has laid a sound foundation for the devolved system of government; a foundation that has the potential to multiply the economic fundamentals of our county economies immeasurably. You may ask why we chose to accelerate certain goals in our development agenda. Why did we choose to accelerate the issuance of titles deeds, double our road networks, build a brand new modern railway, double our power production and double our GDP? Why has my administration taken such tremendous strides in creating accelerated development? It took England 200 years to industrialise, the United States of America 160 years, and Japan 110 years. However, we look not towards those nations but to China, which compressed the progressive economic changes experienced by those countries into a single generation. Instead of taking the 200 years it took England to industrialise, China took only 35 years. Similarly, the four Asian Tigers of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the Republic of Korea took 25 years to industrialise. And that is why their accelerated growth was called the ‘Asian Miracle’. The secret to these ‘miracles’ was acceleration. The Asian Tigers, for instance, accelerated the achievement of critical development fundamentals; and this allowed them to industrialise at a rate that was faster than ‘normal’. They contracted their development timelines by implementing aggressive interventions on multiple sectors of the economy, simultaneously. This reduced the intervals between the phases of industrialisation and allowed them to catch-up with the West. And like these countries, the policy choices of my administration have been about contracting our development timelines through aggressively implemented projects. We are moving with speed because there is no time like the present to deliver the dreams of Kenyans for a better tomorrow. If the acceleration models worked for the Asian Tigers, who were at the same level of development as Kenya in 1965, they can work for us too. And if these countries industrialised in 25 years because of the bold choices they made, we too can set the stage for economic transformation and achieve it in record time. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}