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{
"id": 1380082,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1380082/?format=api",
"text_counter": 262,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Orwoba",
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"speaker": null,
"content": "I requested for a new meter and it took so much drama for them to even come and audit whether they needed to change my meter if it was faulty. I feel like Kenyans have been held hostage because of the monopoly that KPC has. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, when we are talking about transparency, it is not only on the billing, but Kenyans are not understanding. Yes, you can say, the cost of fuel has gone up and it has affected so many things. However, I urge the Chairperson of the KP Board, my good friend, Joy Masinde to, first of all, conduct sensitisation. Kenyans want to understand what they are paying for exactly in their Bill. Is it the levies or some service charge? It is important. It is also imperative that when we are talking about transparency, we talk about transparency at all levels in KPC, including the procurement processes. We also want transparency on the employment opportunities. I sit at the National Cohesion and Integration Committee (NCIC) and we are looking at various issues in terms of employment opportunities. You will find some of the reasons why we have a lot of corruption and shoddy deals is also because, we are not transparent on who we are hiring. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I am so happy that we have had a Committee sit down, research, analyse and interrogate the operations and even bring out to light this issue of IPPs. Finally, there is an attempt to address the cartelism in KPC. In summary, we are all in one way or another tied to KPC, whether it is your office or home. The fact that we are not discussing how to bring healthy competition in this industry is the first problem. We can audit the IPPs and the operations, but the question remains, do we want to be held hostage? Do we want to stay in this situation where if KPC wakes up today and they decide they want to play some shoddy business, we will all be stuck to it? No. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this conversation should go further to develop mechanisms to open up this market. For a very long time, we had only one Telkom service provider. It took you almost eight months to get a landline. The people within that space made sure that no one else would be a player in that industry. Finally, when we cracked that whip and understood that we have to move forward as a country, look at the kind of competition that we now have in that space. We have Safaricom, Telkom and all sorts of providers in terms of internet. That competition is what we need when it comes to power producers and distributors. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I urge my colleagues that as much as we are contributing to this Report, it would be imperative that one of us actually comes up with a Bill. We need to perhaps legislate and ensure that we have competition in that space. With those many remarks, I am still waiting for KPC to come and conduct and audit on my average use. I have written letters, made noise and knocked on doors when my bills shot up as I said, from Kshs5,000 to Kshs25,000, on just the day that I came here and got sworn in. Those are some of the things that many Kenyans are also going through. I look forward to the day that, finally, this industry will not be an industry of monopoly. It will be opened up and there will be competition just like the days of"
}