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"id": 1200780,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1200780/?format=api",
"text_counter": 183,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mathare, ODM",
"speaker_title": "Hon. Anthony Oluoch",
"speaker": null,
"content": "to a question is like a lady’s skirt. It is short enough to excite and long enough to cover the substance. Well, the jury is still out as to whether the President’s Speech excited the base enough. When I say “base”, I mean the election promises that were made under the Kenya Kwanza plan. The jury is still out, in my view, as to whether it was long enough to cover the substance. Listening to a number of Members, quite some ground was covered, but there are other issues that were not quite well-covered. Secondly, Hon. Deputy Speaker, I wanted to speak to the issue of the tone. In my view, the tone of the Speech was moderate. This was an opportunity for the President to try and bring together the more than 6.9 million Kenyans who still felt aggrieved, for one reason or the other, and those who did not vote for him. However, to my disappointment, looking at Paragraph 11, if I was to quickly glean through what the President said, it amounted to a trolling of his chief opponent, the Right Hon. Raila Amollo Odinga. In that paragraph, he said that it is only in Kenya where a sitting Deputy President becomes the candidate of the opposition, and the opposition leader becomes the candidate of the Government, and that the candidate of the opposition becomes the President. I thought that was an opportunity not to rub salt in the wounds of the 6.9 million people who he clearly stated at his inauguration that he will be President of, whether they voted for him or not. I thought that that was an opportunity to try and rally everybody together, both the seven million who voted for him, and those who did not. Going forward, I hope presidential speeches will be corrected. These include the ones that I witnessed at the burial of the Deputy President’s brother, where some of our Members still seemed to be in an election mood and were trying to pull back the President into rubbing salt in the wounds of the losers in a manner that suggested that while the people who lost have moved on and are trying to heal, the victors apparently seem to find pleasure in trying to bring those people back and rubbing salt in their wounds. Going forward, I hope the President will correct that. The first point that I noted that I want to speak to is on the issue of oversight. In Paragraph 16 of the Speech, the President indicated that he would try to ensure that institutions work, that Parliament provides oversight, and that members of the Cabinet are here to answer Questions as part of enhancing that oversight. I would like to go back to Paragraph 11 and paraphrase it. He said that it was only in Kenya where we have a sitting deputy elected as president, the opposition leader being the candidate of the Government, and opposition candidate being elected president. It is also true that it is only in Kenya where an elected President, in his first 30 days, makes it his business to implement one of the main campaign platforms and policies of the opposition leader. I thank him for this because when he says he wants to bring Cabinet Secretaries to Parliament, is that not the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) that was shot down by the current President and his team? This is an attempt at implementing piecemeal some of what we proposed in the BBI."
}