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{
    "id": 1186538,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1186538/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 344,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Dagoretti South, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. John Kiarie",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Hon. Temporary Speaker, this is the first time I am speaking to something substantive this afternoon. I take the earliest opportunity to congratulate you for ascending to the presidium and I know you are no stranger to that seat having presided over in a previous Parliament as Deputy Speaker. It has been quite a pleasure. What a joy it has been this afternoon having you preside over the business of this House. Thank you also for your magnanimity. As I reply, I would like to refer to the statements I made when I was moving this Motion. I took this House down memory lane. I talked about one man, Mr. John Dawson Ainsworth, a colonialist who was a District Commissioner in his twenties. He was tasked with a job of establishing a city. He had been a District Commissioner in Masaku where the colonialists had imagined the capital city would be but he was moved here when they identified the piece of land which they thought was fit to build a city. Mr Ainsworth planted trees. Unfortunately, they were not very environmentally friendly ones, but he was planting trees to treat a malady of flooding in this city. In his own wisdom, he had found out that the Australian blue gum was very good in sucking water out of land that was as swampy as Nairobi. As the Swahili say, “ baniani mbaya, kiatu chake dawa ”. This man, though a very apartheid driven colonialist, did great service to this city by planting many trees. You know Hon. Temporary Speaker that these trees have existed for more than a century. It is us Kenyans, in our own wisdom or lack of it, who have cut down the trees that were planted by John Dawson Ainsworth. But I will not celebrate him as much as I will celebrate a man by the name Mr John Gakuo. Mr John Gakuo was a committed selfless civil servant. Unfortunately, someone has said, it was Lee Kwang-Yee who wrote in his book that the tragedy of Africa is that we kill our best. Mr John Gakuo died in prison crying to be taken to hospital just to get some medical attention. He was one of our finest civil servants and one of our best Clerk in this city."
}