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{
    "id": 1400480,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1400480/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 168,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Orwoba",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Madam Temporary Speaker, one of the proposals that I have is that above and beyond giving a legal framework of how we are going to deal with the imposition of property taxes, there should be an element of dictating on how that money is spent to some extent. It does not make any sense that a county as big as Nairobi is earning so much on property taxes, but when we have basic weather changes, it is those same properties that are being hit the highest. You are collecting so much from the markets. I was so surprised. If you go to Dagoreti North, the markets there have been taken over by cartels. The rates that are being imposed in Dagoretti North and in the markets there in Kawangware are crazy. When it rains, those are the markets that are hit by floods, whose sewer is blocked, who close shops because it rained the day before. There has to be some level of responsibility. We can legislate this by saying that a percentage of the money that is collected from these property taxes should be pumped back into the same infrastructure. This is in the sense that even the people who are paying these levies and taxes are motivated. Madam Temporary Speaker, I do not know how to hammer this enough because I have said this before. I am always reading the statistics and trying to highlight that we need to get to a point, as a country, where we do live within our means. That means that if we are earning from this own source revenue from various taxes, including the property taxes that we are now trying to streamline, we also have to demand, as Senate, that the counties that report the lowest own source revenue should tell us why, after 20 years or so, they cannot channel these marginalised funds that we are giving into infrastructural projects or something that can now pump back money into the own source revenue. I say this because we have counties such as Wajir, Tana River, Mandera, West Pokot and Marsabit that receive the highest funds in terms of allocation, yet they are bringing in the lowest in terms of own-source revenue. No one wants to address that, but it comes down to the question of, is it that there are no businesses there? Is it that there are no buildings or no form of economic activity? As much as we are trying to streamline the property taxes, we also have to ask ourselves, is it that in Tana River where the own source revenue is only coming to Kshs59 million, which is like a drop in the ocean, we do not have any economic activities after all these years of pumping in money for infrastructure, getting supplementary budgets and all the oversight? What is the problem? We could be legislating here and trying to impose this new law for property taxes, but might not even be able to affect some of these counties. I do not understand if they do not have properties there or they are trying to have an economic activity. We will keep running away from the issue of own source revenue versus monies that are being given from the national budget, but at one point whether we legislate property taxes and all these issues or even deal with corruption, if we cannot understand why certain counties are unable to move from where they were 15 years ago and years after devolution and sending---"
}