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{
    "id": 1334128,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1334128/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 41,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kikuyu, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Kimani Ichung'wah",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Speaker. It is, indeed, one of the issues I have noted. The Public Petitions Committee should involve the Office of the Registrar of Persons in their deliberations. It is pretty clear that the Government should know how many students are in classrooms from Grade 1 to Form IV at every turn of the year. There should be no reason why, even at the turn of the year in January, someone should claim what Mr Indimuli has said in the Petition. Because the data that was used was from November and December, there are more students admitted into secondary schools. They are not admitted from the blues. They sat for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) the previous year. The Government knows how many students sat for KCPE, for instance, in this financial year and should plan for them. Parliament also has a role to play. I am sure you will give the Departmental Committee on Education Chairman a chance to contribute. He will tell you that there is always a financial gap of about Ksh22 billion in secondary school education funding. This occasions the deficits that come in. The Budget and Appropriations Committee must ensure that we appropriate adequate resources not only to day secondary schools, but also to our boarding schools. There are also cases of fraud. Across all our constituencies, some teachers escalate the actual number of students that they have in NEMIS vis-`a-vis the ones in classrooms. This causes a great disservice to others who are not captured in NEMIS. The Ministry should leverage Information and Communications Technology (ICT). I like what the Member for Dagoretti South has said. In this day and age, we can capture all those students, from Grade 1 to Form IV and leverage ICT to ensure that everyone has funds. When the Leader of the Minority Party contributed, he proposed that the Government should say that they are unable to pay the capitation and allow headteachers to increase school fees. Under these strenuous economic times, we must never allow headteachers to raise school fees anywhere. The Government of Kenya should pay them for all our children. I want to advise my good friend, Hon. Opiyo Wandayi. The Members of the Minority Party claim that school fees and fuel costs have gone up. You cannot say here that we allow school fees to go up. It must not go up at all. We also have bursaries. He is the same person who raised the issue of bursaries yesterday. The multiplicity of bursary funds in this country is an issue. Whether we like it or not, we must look into it at one point or the other. The National Government Constituencies Development Fund (NG-CDF), the Ministry of Education and the county governments, against the Constitution, have bursary kitties. If we do not confront this multiplicity of those bursaries today and in the near future, it will become a big problem for us. The money being taken to bursaries should be re-directed to the capitation of secondary schools. If all our public secondary schools are fully catered for, including those who are boarders, we may not need to give bursaries to anybody. I hope the Public Petitions Committee will interrogate the Ministry to ascertain the cost of maintaining a child in a day secondary school or boarding school, whether an extra county, county or national school. If we pool all our resources in the county governments, NG-CDF, and the Ministry of Education to secondary school capitation, we will not need to give people those handouts as bursaries. I beg to support the Petition. I hope that the Public Petitions Committee will look into all those issues. I hope that the Chair of the Departmental Committee on Education will speak to the actual budgetary deficits that occasion some of those deficits in financing. Thank you, Hon. Speaker. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor"
}