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{
    "id": 1200008,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1200008/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 309,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kiminini, DAP-K",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Bisau Kakai",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "We are living in a country that does not really worry about the disaster cycle. The focus in this country remains just on response and recovery. What we have always done as a country is to ignore the portion of preparedness and mitigation. I am saying this because having had an opportunity to work with the United Nations for close to 22 years in 19 countries, officials of other countries are always very responsive and ready to save lives. We have had an opportunity even to come up with a paper while working in the presidency. We shared it with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, given that they interact with the United Nations. Up to last year, the United Nations was ready to establish for us a humanitarian city where we could keep stockpiles, from medicines to food, and come up with the capacity and even establish the Kenya Disaster Management Authority. However, we know the disaster cycle very well. In a period of every three to five years, we know there will be hunger either natural or man-made disasters. Our focus in this country has just remained on response. By the time we want to respond, there is very little food to respond and very little humanitarian items. You remember in 2018 when we had the Solai Dam emergency, it made the Government borrow around to mobilise about one billion shillings. For what we have put in place or the proposal we have done outside this House, we have had an idea on how we as experts from this country could try to bring resources together and mitigate or be more prepared to reduce what we are seeing. His Excellency the President talked about food production. But again, producing that food will not be very good if we do not have mechanisms on how to stock it. I know most multilateral organisations including the United Nations really favour Kenya due to geographical positioning. From Kenya, they would like to keep their stockpiles here. They have most of the UN agencies here and are ready to invest here, but it has always been driven from a political perspective where people sitting in different offices are not in a position to really understand that we have to support it."
}