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{
    "id": 1156224,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1156224/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 131,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Cheruiyot",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13165,
        "legal_name": "Aaron Kipkirui Cheruiyot",
        "slug": "aaron-cheruiyot"
    },
    "content": "club they were sponsoring. It played in the Kenyan Premier League and it used to do well. There were many others as well. We can think of Nzoia. There was Nzoia Football Club (FC). This is an industry that used to thrive. However, because of mismanagement and how we are not good at making good companies grow bigger and better, we lost it at some point. The long and short of this conversation is that we need to ask ourselves whether what this Bill is proposing is really the problem. Is it for want of good laws that the sugar sector is in the state it is in? I know for a fact because, in my other life, I am actively involved in this sector apart from being a politician. We have good laws that can help this sector to thrive. Madam Temporary Speaker, because of loopholes that continue to be used by people in power who do not want this sector to thrive and who make more money importing sugar into the country instead of ensuring our own sector thrives, we now find ourselves in the situation we are in. I have done extensive tours of sugar factories and mills in Uganda, our neighbouring country. We import a lot of sugar from Uganda. If you are to do a comparison, you will find in many of these factories in Uganda such as Naitiri, Kakira and others apart from receiving sugar from out growers which forms only 10-20 per cent of their milling capacity, the rest 80 per cent is self-generated. Madam Temporary Speaker, they have control of the value chain. They have collated different groups of people. The new model they have adapted in other parts of the country is that they tell the farmer to give them land and they run the entire thing. Those farmers lease out their land together with the cane and the factory runs everything. Then they wait for end month when they are shown what has come out of their farm and receive their pay. That works better. World over, small scale businesses continue to struggle. Apart from tea, there is no other crop that continues to successfully generate income for its farmers by way of small scale. Many other crops thrive when done in large scale because you are able to manage farm inputs and to observe expected standards to ensure sufficient yield. However, we do not see such a concrete proposal coming out of this. This is not to say that this is not a good Bill. I endorse this Bill a 100 per cent. There are good prospects and many positives about this Bill which I will later come on to in my concluding remarks. I was only talking about areas that I feel we strongly need to think broadly about perhaps as we go to Committee stage, though I doubt whether that opportunity is there. Many issues of agriculture are at policy level. Those are not things you can legislate about. You cannot force the Government to generate or provide a conducive environment for private players to be able to invest locally. Madam Temporary Speaker, I agree with Sen. Shiyonga that many of the private millers running their mills here in Kenya are the ones responsible for this sector being in this situation that it is in. They prefer to do work that makes money for them because it is cheaper. However, that does not make sense to our economy and our country. As leaders and representatives of the people, it is incumbent upon us to think about it and say what it is we are going to do to, first, provide a conducive environment."
}