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{
    "id": 1284296,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1284296/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 208,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Maanzo",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13589,
        "legal_name": "Maanzo Daniel Kitonga",
        "slug": "maanzo-daniel-kitonga"
    },
    "content": "happened in my case when I was in primary school? So, what is the age at which we should discourage cigarette smoking? That has to be reviewed from 18 years and then mixed up with e-marketing, where even children have access. Then there is the issue of advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, which has been done by the companies that deal with that. The advertising has moved from radio and television to e-advertising. How do we deal with that? We will need a law. Right now, we do not have a law dealing with that. A lot of products contain nicotine. Cigarette smoking has moved from cigarettes and now it is in products. You find that some products have nicotine, including chocolate flavouring. That has not been taken care of by a lot of laws in the world. You have also health warnings. People do not know how dangerous this is until it gets into them or up to the moment families are breaking or someone has to go through very expensive treatment. When you have cancer; a disease where you know that you are terminally ill, even if you are flown to India or taken anywhere, people are just fundraising to extend your life, but definitely, that person is going to die and they have brought upon themselves these deaths by smoking heavily. Also, when expectant mothers smoke, the nicotine stays in the body and affects pregnancies, then they give birth to unhealthy children. We have really not gone into the details of this in terms of our law. Then there is the issue of taxation and pricing. Cigarette business should be so expensive to run. It should also be very expensive for an individual to entertain himself with a cigarette by making sure that is the right place to tax, but not fuel. We should heavily tax that area to make sure that cigarette smoking is contained. There is also the issue of smoking in public places like inside buses, matatus and hotels. Even in towns we now have a law designating this. Again, what is the role of the counties? We are just about to go for Senate Mashinani . This is a matter that is also devolved. It is both a national matter and a devolved matter. So, how do we go about that? There are countries that Sen. Mumma has talked, but which have dealt with this scenario. They come from the Common Wealth jurisdiction. We share similarities in history and our law making. I believe that we should copy some of these good examples in the world so that we can fight cigarette smoking, especially e-marketing on smoking and everything that has now gone electronic, dealing with cigarette smoking. Regardless of the filtering, the final dangerous active reagent is nicotine. What do we do to make sure that it does not affect children or secondary smokers? I do support and am willing to work with the very active Sen. Mumma whose husband was my lecturer at the University of Nairobi when I was a law student. It is a family that I admire very much and what they do to change the lives of people in many spheres of life. I will work with her to make sure that this transforms into a Bill. We can make strong laws to make sure children of this country and secondary smokers are assisted and those who smoke are made aware that they are killing themselves. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, Sir. I support."
}