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{
    "id": 1153148,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1153148/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 88,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": "He promised free primary education and within the first two months of his government, Kenyans tasted the sweet cake of free universal primary education. The enrolment in primary schools quadrupled. Children who had been hidden in the villages looking after cattle or working as house servants, all came out and went to school, to the extent that we had a seventy- or eighty-year-old man called Mr. Kimani Maruge, who came out and went to school; he started his primary education. That is how His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki will be remembered. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the late Mwai Kibaki was a President with a difference. Sen. Poghisio and Sen. Orengo whom has just left worked with him in his cabinet. They will tell you that he never entertained cheap gossip of any nature. The only time you sat with the late Mwai Kibaki as his Ministers, apart from those who worked with him like in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was after Cabinet, when you would all be invited to lunch. There was no group gossip where people walk to State House and ruin other people’s name or career and destroy them. I remember my brother Sen. Poghisio was forcefully removed from Parliament through those State House gossips. His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki never entertained that kind of gossip. He was a serious person. You went to his office and there was no time that you did not find him busy reading, analyzing budgets, Ministry and international agency reports. At the end of the day, many people who worked with His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki even started underestimating him, thinking that they could take advantage of him because of his quite demeanor. He would always tell those of us who were close to him, “Listen, young man. Your biggest strength in your life and politics in particular is to always appear not to know what you know.” That was his clarion call. Always appear not to know what you know. Let people think that you are a fool, but you can see right through them”. That was His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki for you. He was a man who believed that this country had the potential to explode. He was a man who believed in equity and that every corner of this country deserved something. Even as he did not go to many places, His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki would always ask his Ministers, “You have brought this project about this area, what about those other areas?” Mr. Speaker, Sir, one of the greatest selfless conducts of His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki is when they finished the Thika Super Highway. We went there and some excited civil servant said, “Mr. President, we are going to name this road “Kibaki Super Highway.” His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki asked him, “Na kule barabara hiiinaenda, hakuna majina?” He did not want the grandiose of being named after everything. Everywhere you turn, international airports and high schools, it is so and so. His Excellency the late Mwai Kibaki did not entertain that. That is why even as he was the best President in this country we have very few things that are named after him. I would like Sen. Poghisio as the Senate Majority Leader to bring some Motions in to this House so that we name some national icons. We can name one, two or three after this great man, so that we also immortalize his name for the future of this country. Everywhere you go, there is “Moi” or “Kenyatta”. I do not know if it is the first or the second “Kenyatta” but they are all over. We do not slight them. They were named by The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}