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{
    "id": 1272521,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1272521/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 318,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Limuru, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Eng.) John Kiragu",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker. I rise to support this Report. It is important for us to know why we failed to grow the East African Community. The people who colonized us looked at our Community when it was strong and worked around it to ensure it failed. While doing that, they were putting their house in order in Europe and came up with the EU. This region needs to know that when we try to get together, there are forces that will always work against us. We know that by being together, we will be strong economically, trade amongst ourselves, and remove the barriers in transportation, language, education, and research. Looking at the East African Community, we must know that we live in a competitive world. The Community is growing by including the new states that have joined. Other nations are applying to come on board. As this happens, we must work to stay together and remove existing barriers. We must consider ourselves as people who can create a regional bloc competing with other regional blocs. We had a very respectable union. The central workshop of the East African Railways was based here in Nairobi. We had research and libraries together in East Africa. As mentioned in this Report, we can get our act together and formulate how we can fight the rest of the world in this ongoing cruel global economic war. When we talk about shortage of certain food commodity as a country, we will know that our neighbours grow it, which is what we need. In Kenya, we will understand that we manufacture things that our neighbours will require. We need to make sure that we gain from each other and not fight with each other. I pray for a day when the cost of air transport to Mombasa will be more or less like flying to Entebbe or Kigali. We are still making things very difficult for ourselves because we have refused to remove the barriers between our countries. We must remove the barriers between our countries so that people can move freely without burdening themselves with unnecessary additional costs. If you go to Europe, moving from one country to another does not cost much just because you are crossing a border. However, we still maintain those boundaries and restrictions which work against our people. As we move forward, I pray that we open our borders so that our people can take advantage of our resources. Our biggest resource is the people of East Africa. I support the Report."
}