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{
    "id": 1157191,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1157191/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 421,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Funyula, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Dr.) Wilberforce Oundo",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13331,
        "legal_name": "Wilberforce Ojiambo Oundo",
        "slug": "wilberforce-ojiambo-oundo-2"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, for giving me this opportunity. Let me indicate that I am a founder member of the Departmental Committee on Trade, Industry and Co-operatives. I am told it was hived off from the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning in the 12th Parliament. If I am wrong, I am sure I will be corrected. As a result, for some years, I have interacted with traders, businesspeople and everybody involved in both domestic and international trade. Indeed, the cry has always been about bottlenecks associated with transacting a business deal in this country. I also recall sometime in 2019 when I appeared on Citizen Television together with small-scale traders to discuss trade facilitation and how to make import and export processes much cheaper. It was a round-table discussion which illuminated my understanding of the dangers and challenges facing trade in this country. We need to appreciate that trade is, essentially, an exchange of goods and services. Simply, it means those who have certain goods exchange with those who do not have such goods. Before the discovery of money, we used to practise barter trade where people would meet and exchange goods. If you had cassava, you would exchange with fish. I remember my late aunt taught and exposed me to that kind of trade in the late 1970s when I was a small boy. So, I got interested in the process of trade and trade facilitation. When many people talk of trade, they think of a physical market where people can go to and exchange goods and services. Due to technological changes and emergence of money and transport network, buyers and sellers do not have to meet physically. They can transact business virtually. Therefore, in order to ease that kind of arrangement, there must be an electronic system. Hence the concept of national electronic single window system. The short and long of it is that we seek to avoid physical movement of documents. Instead of using courier services to move documents from one place to another, we can lodge those documents online and transact and conclude business without even knowing whom you are transacting with, as long as goods move from one place to another. It is more or less akin to the so-called e-business, where you can order a good and you are supplied with it without having to know the seller. Over the years, the issue of easing trade practices has been one of the strategic goals of the Ministry of Industrialisation, Trade and Enterprise Development. Today, we stand here to support a Bill to actualise that strategic goal. Looking at the Bill keenly, and in order to reduce the number of Acts in the country, this Bill could have been a subset of the ICT Act or the Data Protection Act. The Bill proposes quite a number of amendments to those Acts in order to align them with the legal framework that we need. If you scrutinise the Bill further, its focus on international trade. It is disappointing that local or internal trade is given a casual mention. These are some of the areas that we will need to fine-tune through amendments at the Committee of the whole House. We need to look at best practices and incorporate both international and local trade. Clause 3 says despite clause 2, the system may be used by a person involved in domestic trade transactions. We must have a seamless system that deals with both domestic and international trade. The truth of the matter is that the supply chain is very clear. There must be a primary producer who sells to either an aggregator or 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."
}