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{
"id": 1202360,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1202360/?format=api",
"text_counter": 251,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Kangema, UDA",
"speaker_title": "Hon. Peter Kihungi",
"speaker": null,
"content": " Thank you, Hon. Deputy Speaker. First of all, I thank God, who has made me to come to this House. Second, I thank the Kangema people who elected me as their MP. I also thank His Excellency the President, who has been a good friend of us, and a supporter. I also thank the Speaker of the House for being supportive. I thank you, too, Hon. Deputy Speaker, on being elected. The speech of His Excellency the President was excellent. As it has been said, the speech was short but had the right content. As the President put it, the campaigns were about ideas. I want to put the record straight, that for us from central Kenya, the campaigns were not about tribe or ethnicity. The campaigns were about the ideologies that the UDA party and Kenya Kwanza Alliance came up with. I was in politics at the lower level. From 2007 to 2013, I was a councillor. Between 2013 and 2017, I was an MCA. The aspect of bottom-up and the hustler ideology resonated with our people. During Kibaki’s term from 2007 to 2013, the aspect of Vision 2030 was very critical. The management and budgets of every department, including our local authority institutions were based on Vision 2030. We walked along the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which we had to achieve by 2015. The Jubilee Government then picked up from where Hon. Kibaki left. There is nothing to do with two tribes. Vision 2030’s political pillar is a democratic political system that is issue-based, people-centred, result- oriented and accountable to the public. Therefore, as political parties, we must separate this from the tribal aspect. That way, nobody will lie to you that they will develop your tribe. Let people come up with ideologies to change the economy of this country. The President spoke a lot about agriculture. My county and constituency are about agriculture. I want to thank the President because today he acted on an issue to do with agriculture by flagging off a tea container headed to Ghana under the African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA). These are the ideologies that made our people to support the agenda that was sold by Kenya Kwanza. The issue of tea marketing is very critical to a tea farmer. Whenever a government says that it will walk the talk and see how tea farmers can make a kill in their business, everybody will run on that ideology. I thank His Excellency the President, because today our tea is headed to Ghana. He said that he is going to work on the issue of value addition and move it from 5 per cent to 50 per cent and we have seen him doing it. We are going to support him on the issue of agriculture. We will support him on value addition. When the President will bring issues on value addition, we will support him because tea is a very great foreign income earner. He said that he would add value mostly in orthodox tea. When the Government allocates money in it, it will improve its foreign earnings. Hon. Deputy Speaker, the President said that he would work on how our recurrent expenditure would be less than the revenue. That is a move which we support. We have many projects which are ongoing like Mau Mau Road, that everybody wants to see done. Therefore, as the President put it, we will support him 100 per cent to see that the recurrent expenditure does not supersede that of development. I want to talk about the issue of PPPs in water, which is well thought out. We cannot say that we will not allocate money for water in the Budget. Whenever we have big dams – we have Karimenu and Thwake Dams whose construction is ongoing; the construction of Aror and Kimwarer Dams was stopped politically. However, everybody wants it to be done. When we allocate Ksh10 billion or Ksh20 billion for those projects, the most important thing for the country is distribution. PPPs will be doing major projects like dams. We need Maragua Dam in Murang’a County, where we can supply the residents of Murang’a and Nairobi with water. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for informationpurposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}