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{
    "id": 1172163,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1172163/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 318,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kilifi North, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Owen Baya",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13373,
        "legal_name": "Owen Yaa Baya",
        "slug": "owen-yaa-baya"
    },
    "content": " Thank you very much, Hon. Speaker. I stand on a point of order to actually agree with Hon. Kimani Ichung’wah. One of the tenets of a great democracy and constitutionalism is freedom from discrimination. You have students who are now being sent to public universities and others to private universities. These are two different lanes, but then you give students undue advantage because you are taking them to private universities which have better infrastructure. That is why they are private, because their infrastructure is different from public universities. Now, we are saying that my son will go to a public university, but the same body places another person’s son who has gone through the system, in a private university without them giving them the opportunity to choose whether to go to a public or a private university. That is discrimination, and it should not happen. When students are being placed by this Government, they should be placed in public universities. Let those who want to go to private universities make a choice that they are going to private universities without having to use taxpayers’ money that gives them undue advantage over the others. That is a constitutional issue. Secondly, public universities today are dying, and we know. I have a university in my backyard, Pwani University, which has a very ambitious and strategic plan; a plan that would have been funded by the Exchequer. However, a lot of this money now is not going to these public universities, which the late Hon. President Kibaki really put his foot down to ensure that universities exist. If you look at the Land-Grant College Act in the USA on why public universities are there, they are centres of development in the rural areas. Where there is a public or state university in the USA, you see that the town grows and everything else grows, and you see a lot of estates there have grown because of the presence of a state university under the Land-Grant College Act. Today we are taking away that great thought, that if you put a university in Kilifi, it will grow and grow the town and the economy around there and everybody else benefits. We are taking this money to private universities that are in town, and that are owned by people thereby making a few people rich using Government money, disregarding the Public Finance Management Act that this public money must be audited. If you take it to Kabarak University or Mount Kenya University… You can see the way Mount Kenya University is flourishing, and I ask you why. It is because Government money is being pumped there. Sometimes I sit down and wonder; are there politically connected people that are actually benefiting from this money? Why is Kabarak University now being funded more than Pwani University in my backyard? Is it because a son of a prominent man is now the owner of that university? These are the questions that we must ask. Therefore, this Bill should be given due time to be looked at and scrutinised, and those amendments that I have particularly proposed are dealt with at a different session, not when we just have a little time or a few hours to adjourn sine die, and then we want to pass these amendments. Hon. Speaker, I beg that you intervene on this and ensure that the right thing is done to these Kenyans, and that public money is not siphoned off and taken to private universities. I thank you, Hon. Speaker."
}