Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 1153271,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1153271/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 211,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. (Dr.) Ochillo-Ayacko",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "During his tenure as the President and the Head of the Nation, he was a great person. I had the rare privilege of serving in his Government as his first Minister for Energy and Petroleum, and later as the Minister for Sports, Culture and Social Services. I did not canvass or lobby for that appointment. I guess he picked me because he saw promise and honesty in me and really supported my tenure as a Minister. I remember his commitment to Kenyans when I was his Minister. I was a Minister full of ideas. As a young person in early thirties, I thought the world was in my pocket and I was atop the world. At one time, I took a Cabinet Paper to President Kibaki full of English and what I would call bombastic language that was not very clear, now that I look back at it from a calm position. He looked at it and told me: “Hon. Ochillo, just tell me two things; when will the cost of energy come down and be affordable to Kenyans? That is what he asked me. He said that all those nice words I had written were nothing to Kenyans if the cost did not come down. He said that, that was good, but he wanted to know when the cost of energy would come down. I went back to my Ministry and looked at it. That is when we came back with the idea of unbundling the energy sector. We took away Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) and made it an infrastructural institution, so that the cost of generation of electricity would not be passed on to consumers. We left Kenya Power and Lightening Company (KPLC) as a distributing entity that was supposed to charge modest revenue and the cost came down and became stable. President Kibaki became happy about that. When it came to petroleum products, however much there was pressure to place taxes on petroleum products, he was consistently saying that was a no-go-zone because that would increase the cost of energy and would affect the cost of living of Kenyans. President Kibaki was very sensitive to something that would cost Kenyans more. He is a president we should have had today, this week, last week and this month, because nobody seems to know how to handle the rising cost of energy and energy products. Kenyans are suffering everywhere. President Kibaki, at the time we had a crisis of similar proportion, did not go out there to talk. He acted and everything calmed down. That was President Kibaki speaking loudly through his action and not noise. We all remember that he was at one time dropped as a Vice President and made Minister for Health, a situation that other people could not countenance. I do not want to talk negatively about the late Simon Nyachae with whom we served both in Government and Opposition ventures. The late Nyachae could not countenance being dropped as Minister for Finance and assigned another Ministry. Kibaki diligently served as Minister for Health, having been dropped from being the Minister for Finance and also the Vice President, but he never complained about it. In the current situation, you can hear loud and disruptive complaints that come from the Office of the Deputy President on matters that we do not know. 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."
}