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{
    "id": 1353427,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1353427/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 293,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kitui Rural, WDM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. David Mwalika",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you very much, Hon. Temporary Speaker, for giving me this opportunity to support the Report. From the outset, I want to thank the Committee and its Chairman for the good work they have done. It is very important if we can be looking at this CFS and I think we need a report quarterly because this is a Fund which is being misused under Article 223. Supplementary Estimates I for this financial year has proposed significant changes under CFS expenditure to cater for the debt service. Because of the depreciation of the Kenyan shilling, the debt service has gone up. Debt is not a very bad thing because there is no country or person who can develop without debt. When we talk about countries with the highest debts, Japan has the highest debt to GDP at 256 per cent, USA is at 133 per cent and our neighbour Sudan, has 186 per cent debt to GDP ratio, while Kenya is at 67 per cent. Those countries are not complaining. Why are we complaining? Debt is not a bad thing. What matters is how you utilise the debt, and that is where the rain started beating us. What impact did the loans we borrowed bring to this country? That is what we need to be asking ourselves. Which regions did the debts go? In economics, there is what we call the law of diminishing returns. You can do something in one place thinking that you are going to increase production, but at the end of the day, the production goes down. Hon. Temporary Speaker, at one time, I was a consultant on the Lamu Port, South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport Corridor Project (LAPSSET). That is where you come from. Implementation of LAPSSET project was increasing the GDP of this country by 2 per cent, which is a very significant increment, but have we really started doing those projects? Is what we did in Lamu productive? That is money lying there, and it is wasted. Those are the issues we need to address. At times I ask Members of Parliament what the role of Parliament on public debts is. Most of us may not be knowing, but we are playing a significant role by increasing the debt owed by this country. When we approve budgets estimates with deficits, we are already telling the Government to borrow. Yesterday, we passed Supplementary Budget 1 for this financial year with a deficit of Ksh718 billion. We are simply telling the Government to go to the market and borrow that money. We should not say that we are not part and parcel of debt creation in this country. What we need to do as Parliament is to approve a balanced budget where our revenues and expenditures are the same. That way, we are not going to have significant borrowing in this country. It is true that the Kenyan shilling has depreciated. During COVID-19, the Americans spent a lot of money on social welfare and they have been mopping that money because of the resultant inflation. That is why our shilling is depreciating. Most of the investors in the world prefer to invest in the USA, which is a stable economy, than in an African economy that is not very stable. To handle these things, we need to increase our production. I thank Members. We need to increase our agricultural production to have new products for exports. Vision 2030 was proposing that we set up a leather city in Kinanie. We need to ask ourselves what happened to that proposal. Can we produce leather and export it?"
}