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{
    "id": 1371277,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1371277/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 270,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 170,
        "legal_name": "Bonny Khalwale",
        "slug": "bonny-khalwale"
    },
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I rise to support these three combined Motions as moved. This is an issue of health. The general principle of this failure to save lives is that the system of health in Kenya is not working. It is dead at the national level and especially at the county level. Therefore, I wish my submission this afternoon to be limited on only one thing, namely, let us clean up this system of health. I remember in 1976 when I was a little boy in high school, the State of Israel came from Tel Aviv to save 90 Israelis who had been hijacked on a Pan Am Airline. If it was Kenya where thousands of people die from negligence, they could have said “We cannot take our elite forces to Entebbe. It is going to be too expensive for us to go and save those 90 people.” One of the finest soldiers who ever lived in the history of the military was Yonatan Yoni Netanyahu. Yonatan Yoni was a student in the USA who was in military school. He had qualified to join a medical school in Islo, but Shimon Peres told him you are too smart to be a doctor. You must work for the Israeli Army. So, when the crisis erupted in Entebbe, since the Israeli Government respects human life, they picked this top brain and waited for him to be airlifted from USA to Tel Aviv. He joined the elite forces, went to Entebbe and they rescued the Israelis who had been kidnapped. It shows what a caring government can do. Our county governors are totally unable to manage the medical staff or maintain the supply chain of medical supplies. It is so bad that now the common thing in social media is where you see low-level employees in county governments stealing drugs from county hospitals, sub-county hospitals, dispensaries and health centres and selling them to quack pharmacies and quack medics because the supply chain has broken down. Maybe we should not keep quiet. Governors are facing challenges in managing the medical staff. Sen. Mungatana, you and I were there. When we created the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) into the Constitution. Maybe we needed to also put a health service commission in the Constitution so that they would manage issues of how much one is paid; who will be hired, transferred, disciplined, who will be on leave and those kinds of things. Now, the governors are unable to do it, so what happens is that the system has collapsed. It is only a few months ago in this House when we passed conditional revenue to try and stock our county hospitals and other facilities with medical supplies. I remember it ran into billions of shillings. Kakamega County was privileged, we got Kshs972 million. Up to now if you go to Matungu Hospital in Kakamega, to Shibwe Sub-county Hospital in Kakamega, Lukuyani or Lugari; there is no medicine in all of them. Where does this money normally go? Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, there is something very unfortunate going on which we must curb. Today, the collections from hospitals are viewed by governors as own source revenue. So they sweep this money from hospitals and put the money on the County Revenue Fund (CRF). Then from the CRF, the money that was raised because of cost-sharing within the hospital is then used to fund trips for the governor and his elite team instead of being ploughed back into the hospital. So, there is work for us to do as Senators and work to be done by the National Assembly to get this problem right."
}