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{
"id": 1202380,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1202380/?format=api",
"text_counter": 271,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Tongaren, FORD-K",
"speaker_title": "Hon. John Chikati",
"speaker": null,
"content": " Thank you, Hon. Deputy Speaker. I take this opportunity to thank the people of Tongaren for electing me overwhelmingly and giving me an opportunity to serve in this House. I am so grateful to them for this occasion. I would like to go straight to the President’s Address. His Excellency, the President alluded to the national housing plan as a remedy to affordable housing in our country. As you know, affordable housing will contribute to the image and dignity of our people as captured in Article 28 of our Constitution. I would like to link the national housing plan to the role of Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) institutions. Records from the TVET Department indicate that last year alone, 86,000 students graduated from various TVETs in this country. This is a huge number of students, out of which 95 per cent of these graduates did not get employment. In Tongaren alone, last year there were 600 students who graduated from different TVETs; and in the last three years, we have had about 3,500 graduates from TVETs. Most of them have not had access to employment. Therefore, for many years, we have had a delink between the trainees in the TVET sector and the industry. I think the proposal by His Excellency the President will be the answer we have been waiting for so that TVET trainees will provide the manpower required in the national housing program. This will solve the unemployment we are seeing in the entire country. There are over one million young people in the country who trained themselves with various skills without having gone to class, like masonry, carpentry, plumbing, electrical works and others. The TVET Department has come up with a program called prior learning program for the students who are self-taught so they can get certificates and become competitive. These are students who did not pass through school, but trained themselves to get certificates so that they can be competitive in terms of competing for tenders and earn something so that they can support their families. Therefore, the housing programme is going to solve a very big problem in as far as TVET is concerned. Most of the TVET institutes in Kenya have a lot of machines that are lying idle. I have been the secretary in charge of TVET in the Office of Deputy President, who is the current President, and we did a lot of statistics. There are so many machines lying idle in so many of these institutions. Therefore, if this housing programme will take off, I am sure it will solve one of the biggest problems that we have been experiencing. In the area of education, which His Excellency also touched on, in my constituency we have 130 primary and 53 secondary schools with total number of students at around 80,000. Half of these students do not have access to education in a proper manner, because each day they are on the road having been sent to look for fees. The Ministry of Education is supposed to be releasing Kshs.22,000 per student per year in terms of capitation. This money has been split so much by the Ministry of Education in terms of capitation so that by the time the money is sent to the school, each student gets less than Kshs.10,000 from the Kshs.22,000. The incoming Minister for Education must address this. The second aspect of this issue is that this money is not released on time. The schools take up to even four or five months before getting this money. For example, for the last three months, it is only last week that funding in terms of capitation was released to schools, and this is affecting education. Therefore, the NG-CDF has a complementary role to play in the area of education in terms of complementing capitation from the national Government. As you may be aware, 35 per cent of the NG-CDF goes directly to bursaries, and then the remaining goes into construction and other activities. As we are seated here, students are not going to school because they do not have fees. I am appealing to my colleagues and, of course, to His Excellency the President to help us so that the NG-CDF will go back to the normal continuity of programmes, so that students can go back to school. 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."
}