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{
    "id": 134441,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/134441/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 298,
    "type": "other",
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    "content": "COMESA a lot of money and yet he is proud to tell us that we are doing very well with COMESA. What about when COMESA will turn around and say: “You are not meeting your contractual obligations. We do not want to have any business to do with you” So, we would like to ask the Minister to ensure that the contractual obligations with COMESA, the PTA and others are met on time to make sure that we do not run into problems because those are the people we should be talking to as we increase the trade I was talking about earlier on. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Ministry is also very much involved with the EU, the EDF, the EPAs and all those. We found in this area that as far as the EDF monies are concerned, the Ministry keeps that entirely to itself. The information is not given to hon. Members to know what is happening with the EDF and EPAs. As a Committee, we urge the Ministry to make sure that, indeed, this information reaches hon. Members so that when they have programmes on EDF--- You will ask them and they will say they are in Bungoma or another region but when you ask an hon. Member for that area whether he knows anything about it, he tells us that he does not know at all. So, I would like to urge the Ministry to make sure that this kind of information is available to hon. Members and through them available to the grassroots. The other area where we found again information lacking was the JLB. We understood that there are monies given out through the JLB but when you go on the ground and you talk to people, very few of them seem to know how that money is allocated and what goes on. So, again, we would like to take this opportunity to urge the Minister to make sure that this kind of information reaches the people who would make use of those loans that are given through the JLB. We are now talking about devolution and if you look at their setup, they still have provincial trade development organization yet the movement is towards constituencies and districts which are now smaller. In our movement towards devolution, do we really need those provincial bodies or should they now be made to go under the constituency and district organizations? So these are questions that, as a Committee, we were asking in terms of devolution. What do we need to do? I said earlier on that there are donor funds and I want to still go back to that. When you look at EPAs, the negotiators in EPAs with the EU are in the Ministry. Our investigations show that, in fact, the donors pay for our own negotiators. Our concern is that, as a country, if we are going to negotiate with somebody and that somebody is paying your negotiator, I think you find yourself in an awkward position. For us in the Committee we started wondering: Can we trust these negotiators because he who pays the piper calls the tune? If the person we are negotiating with is the one paying the piper, we are worried that we may not be getting a good deal. I am sure the Minister knows that the negotiations within EPAs and developing countries have got a raw deal. There are many issues that we are hoping will be re-negotiated. We would like as Parliament and as a Committee to get involved because sometimes in these negotiations, Parliament is totally ignored. Even when the interim signing was done, Parliament never heard of it. You just hear it on the periphery. So, we would like to tell the Minister that sometimes Parliament is his good ally and he should involve it a lot more to ensure that the ownership is for the whole country; after all, Parliament is the representative of the country. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}