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{
    "id": 117828,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/117828/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 546,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Prof. Anyang’-Nyong’o",
    "speaker_title": "The Minister for Medical Services",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 193,
        "legal_name": "Peter Anyang' Nyong'o",
        "slug": "peter-nyongo"
    },
    "content": "The first Republic was the post-colonial Republic that was handed over to us by the colonialists. We now want to have a homegrown Constitution which will deal with our indigenous problems and set a lasting framework for social, political and economic relations in this country. In that regard, land becomes very important. Land, as a factor of production; land as a means of production; land as an important force in a market economy and transiting from pre-capitalist economy to a capitalist economy. In this regard, you will realise that one of the mischiefs that this Policy is trying to deal with is to remove the fetishism in land. That in this period of transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism, we tend to have a lot of fetishism in land; in that we tend to hold land as a security without using it for productive purposes. So, from peasants to commercial speculators, many people hold land. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if you go to the rural areas and more so in my constituency, you will find large parcels of land lying idle mainly because people are speculating with that land. One of the things that this Policy will introduce is a land tax which will force land to enter into the market place as a commodity and make it possible to be used for productive purposes. There is a belief in this country that the more land you have the richer you are. I have seen my friends, including myself, hoarding land from the age of 30 to 65 and still thinking that they have valuable property when all this time they have not used it, and only a few years to their grave they are still happy that they have property. Land is only useful in so far as it can lead to production, and in so far as it can have value for you. The potential value land has in the market place is always potential. It can crush at any time. For example, when there were clashes in this country in the post-election period, a lot of land lost value because their owners found that they could not immediately sell it to make use of it. All over a sudden, they realised that it is useless to have this fetish about land. Secondly, there is a lot of speculation in land as collateral in having commercial transactions. This speculation has led to a lot of distortions in our economy. Housing prices in the urban areas are very high because few people hoard land, speculate, put it as security in banks and borrow money against it. In so far as this land is kept as security, when people get money from banks, one only hopes that the money that is received from the bank is used productively. Quite often, this money is not used productively and it leads to a lot of distortion in the economy, particularly in the 1990s when we had the Goldenberg problem. The issue was also complicated by a lot of land which banks were holding in terms of collateral but which quite often had passed two or three hands and one could not determine who was the rightful owner. This is one of the mischiefs that the"
}