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"id": 113047,
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Mututho",
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"speaker": {
"id": 97,
"legal_name": "John Michael Njenga Mututho",
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"content": "palm wine. If it could be licensed, defined by the authorities and packed decently in such a way that an hon. Member like me can go to a five star hotel and order mnazi without any of those foreign ingredients, that should be the spirit. That is because, at the end of the day, we are Kenyans. Whether we like it or not, people will still drink. The poor man will drink too. I want to give hon. Members another reason why they must support this Bill. The Bill seeks to educate the public about alcohol. In this Bill, we have proposed the creation of a fund, which will be funded by the licence fees that people pay. About 50 per cent of the licence money contained in this Fund will be retained in the districts or constituencies. If we do that, we can organise barazas and seminars to educate people on the pros and cons of drinking. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I want to insist, for special reasons, that drinking is good. I do not drink because of my own reasons. Drinking cannot be banned. It would be ridiculous to even imagine that you can ban drinking. But Kenyans should be subjected to good and healthy alcohol so that, at the end of a hardworking day, you can sit down and enjoy your cup of busaa knowing that there are no rats inside there; there are no inner clothes and no GMO maize. The drink is made of clean maize and the millet is properly fermented. That is what I am talking about. It is our food. It is our beer. We know of some old people, particularly in the Rift Valley Province and parts of Nyanza Province, who have been drinking busaa for over 90 years. They do not experience the problems that we have in Central Province, where men as young as 19 years old cannot even spell or remember their names. They are just there. As I speak now, and those who come from Central Kenya are hearing and they can confirm whether it is true or not, there are thousands of young men lying by the roadside. They stay there up to 8.00 p.m., when their wives go to pick them up. Those women pick up husbands who cannot give them babies because, functionally, it is proven and documented by National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NACADA) that second generation alcohol affects the libido of human beings. It is that serious. It is not a laughing matter. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, whoever imports second or third generation alcohol must, of course, be doing so with the consent of the Government. That is because they pay tax. Most of the so-called âsecondâ or âthirdâ generation alcohols have Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) labels on their containers, meaning that they have paid taxes. So, the Government will have to get its mathematics right. It should either allow that to go on and continue having huge medical bills and having a whole section of a community denied their fundamental God-given right to have children, or come up with a policy that will allow people to continue enjoying their alcohol responsibly. The Government should continue punishing heavily those people who invest in damaging the masses or those ones who want to poison millions of people through alcohol. You only need to go to the media and see some of the stories that are coming from some parts of this country to understand the seriousness of what I am talking about. I did not mention Kisii with a bad heart, but it has been reported that somebody did something from a sewerage and produced methanol and ethanol and called it â changâaa â. So, you know why we need this particular law. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the sixth reason is to eliminate any illicit trade. Over 50 per cent of the alcohol trade in this country is illicit. What has happened is that, due to lack of good statutes, chiefs have become very powerful in their own way. The Officers Commanding Stations (OCSs) have become monsters. The dealers in illicit brews pay royalties to those authorities. Consequently, brewing has become very expensive. What I am saying is that it would be cheaper if the law defines Muratina clearly. It can provide, for instance, that it must be served in containers that are not made of aluminium and specify all the other aspects relating to the consumption of that drink. That way, the chiefs or the local Mungiki goons will not have any justification for collecting royalties from dealers in M uratina and that drink will be made available. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I do not know of a person who can sit here and pretend that there is no alcohol problem. We see it in the Press. We see drums of the so-called â changâaa â being poured away in the valleys and all the other places. We see all kinds of weird things coming up just because we do not have the standards. This Bill seeks to have a good laboratory to test those products. We will have men and women who are experts in alcohol to ensure that the alcohol produced in Kenya meets particular standards. I have talked about Mnazi, which is an invention of the coastal people. It is not an invention of the people of Central Kenya. So, if people in Central Kenya wanted to come up with any concoction and call it Mnazi, it would be illegal. But if the coastal people decide to pack the Mnazi in such a way that it does not conform to the specified packaging of Mnazi, then you will have a problem. You can be fined as much as the law provides, which is about Kshs2 million for that particular adulteration. People must have hygienic drinks. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, this Bill proposes that there will be a rehabilitation programme. As I said, the third reason why people drink is that they are already hooked to alcohol. They are hooked to an extent that they are alcohol-dependent. Those are our brothers, sons and daughters. We cannot just dump them. We must clear our mess. We should come up with methods to solve that problem. We need to detoxify and counsel people and eventually convert them into non-alcohol dependent status. The money collected from licensing should be available to do that particular work. Every decent human being knows that once he has had a meal, he or she has to clean the dishes. The alcoholics are our dishes and we have to clean them up. Somebody has to pay for that cleansing and it should be the person who is doing the brewing. That is why we need that fund. That fund will not be from the Exchequer, it will be from the licences kitty. Currently, people are just left to die. Some of them are serious professionals, including university professors. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I am glad that you worked at the university at one time. That is with a light touch. We cannot have a section of our intellectuals condemned to death because of the fact that they are alcoholics, whereas we know that there are ways and means of rehabilitating them. That is why we are proposing the creation of a fund. Part of the money from that fund will be available to the civil society, who will popularise good contents of alcohol drinking and de-popularise bad habits of drinking alcohol. We thought that if 20 per cent is availed to the civil society, they will talk about alcohol and licensing. They will also create awareness in addressing the second reason. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the marketers are up in arms, they say that if this Bill is passed, you cannot have big billboards and commercials that say: â UkikunywaPilsner, utakuwa kama simbaâ. Those misleading adverts---"
}