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{
    "id": 1338660,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1338660/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 245,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Westlands, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Timothy Wanyonyi",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker. I also want to support this Motion. The issue of sugar in this country has driven many people to poverty, especially farmers from the sugarcane growing regions. The factories in these regions went to importing sugar and this was facilitated by the defunct Kenya Sugar Board. The Board licensed factories to import sugar purportedly to top up on the shortage that was in the country. That was the first mistake because factories stopped paying farmers. The Fund had an easy way of bringing sugar into the country and that sugar was repackaged as if it was coming from those factories. This went on and on. When some of the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) left, the factories collapsed. You wonder the miracles they were performing when they were there, but you then realise that they were just covering up things. So, it is important to regulate the importation of sugar so that we can only bring in sugar for the shortfall that the country is not meeting. This used to be only for industrial sugar, but we are nowadays importing sugar for everything. The Government must strongly put in place regulations to ensure that sugar brought into the country from COMESA is to only cover for the shortfall. Hon. Temporary Speaker, we now need to make sure that as the Government is moving to bring people to lease the factories to investors, it must first pay farmers so as to revive these factories to go back to grinding sugarcane. We have to ensure that people in these regions are not subjected to poverty because of losses. For the cases of Mumias and Nzoia Sugar Companies, communities in those regions are wallowing in poverty because of lack of payment. I want to support this Motion as we move to the new direction. These regulations need to be put in place so that importation of sugar from COMESA and other regions is properly managed. We must also be alive to the situation of middlemen, the so-called ‘cartels’. They are the ones who have made our sugar to be very expensive. Countries like Sudan do not have middlemen in the sugar industry. And that is why when sugar from Sudan comes to Kenya, it is cheaper than our sugar because of the cost of production. In Kenya, the middlemen and unscrupulous businessmen exaggerate sugar prices such that our sugar becomes very unattractive than the imported sugar. Therefore, we must deal with these issues from the onset so that we can regulate the sugar industry and the country benefits from the new legislation. I support this Motion and thank my brother, Hon. Salasya. When we were having the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) meeting in Ghana, we met his lookalike. Every Member of Parliament from Kenya said that Hon. Salasya was there. When we met him, we found that it was not him. You have a lookalike somewhere in this world."
}