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{
"id": 1352756,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1352756/?format=api",
"text_counter": 2516,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dadaab, WDM",
"speaker_title": "Hon. Farah Maalim",
"speaker": null,
"content": "the SGR is costing us twice, if not thrice, of what it would ordinarily have cost us. The Ethiopians paid for a much longer dual line electrical railway for a much cheaper price than what we are paying. The money was stolen. When we are given loans for certain critical sectors like agriculture to enhance the capacity of the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) and the farmers, and help them with value addition, we do not do that. The farmers go for a bumper harvest and are subjected to market forces. Instead of the Government buying all these things as a strategic reserve at the guaranteed minimum returns, they are told to sell their produce at the market. When they sell it at the market, we shortly afterwards suffer a shortage of the same grain. We then import, and the political elites make money from such importation. If you allow the sugar sector to go down the way it has, you give yourself an opportunity to import sugar from places like the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and Brazil and you make a kill. That is exactly what it is. I keep saying that if somebody is stealing their own money, there is no way they can account for it. If Hon. Kiunjuri, a onetime Cabinet Secretary, has a business right now, and has money in his account, and he decides to steal it from himself, there is no way you can stop that. This country is being robbed by the very people who are supposed to be its trustees. Hon. Kiunjuri was talking about how we can help our livestock sector. A small country like Botswana, whose livestock sector was developed by Kenyan experts, is exporting beef all over the world. We have a potential in this country, which no other African country has except Ethiopia and Somalia, in terms of the livestock numbers we have. Do we want to develop them? No, we do not. These days we import everything from South Africa. Our coffee sector, which was supposed to be one of the best and a trailblazer in the continent and in the world, was destroyed. The coffee that gives us the biggest competition in the world right now is Vietnamese coffee. It was introduced by an international civil servant who was a Kenyan. So, the idea came from here, the same way the idea of the European Union came from the East African Community. The Europeans borrowed the idea from us and established the European Union, but we destroyed our own first EAC. They now have the European Union, which works very well. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I thought I had 10 minutes. I can see I am being put on notice. Anyway, I beg you for some more minutes. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I see that money has been set aside for the development of the livestock sector in Northern Kenya and other places. I hope it comes out true because this is going to revolutionise Northern Kenya completely though it is not much. There is groundwater resilience in the Horn of Africa. Currently, our whole region is cut off from the rest of the country. Why? Because we do not have a surface runoff water harvesting service. We could have harvested all that water. There are countries in the world where rivers flow through them and those rivers do not drain into the seas. They make sure that it is re-routed at the point of the sea and put in reservoirs for their people."
}