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{
    "id": 1407787,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1407787/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 366,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Osotsi",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13588,
        "legal_name": "Osotsi Godfrey Otieno",
        "slug": "osotsi-godfrey-otieno"
    },
    "content": "We have had people with historical pending bills all the way from 2014 to now. These are people who have delivered. They constructed hospitals and roads, but they are told they cannot be paid simply because one or two papers are missing. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, our county governments must be serious. I agree with the amendments proposed by the Mover of this Motion that one of the things we need to do is to insist on having a payment plan delivered to the CoB. The payment plan should give priority to historical pending bills so that you do not pay new bills when we have people who supplied since the years 2014, 2015 and 2016, yet they have not been paid to date. Some of them have died while others have closed businesses and you are paying your friends’ current bills. Something has to be done. The biggest problem we are having is the payment of historic pending bills. Some of them are not paid because maybe the governor who is there did not like them, or maybe they were competitors with the former governor, so he ends up not paying the historical pending bills. In order to do justice to our people, this Motion has to be amended to make it very clear that all historic pending bills must be paid by all the county governments. I like the proposal in this Motion that all these pending bills, which are less than Kshs1 billion, must be paid before the end of this year, and the ones which are over Kshs1 billion must be paid before 2024/2025 financial year. This can be done. It is not something difficult to do. This House has powers. We are the ones who approve money that goes into our counties. Why can we not exercise our power for the first time so that our county governments start doing the right thing. Today we have passed the Division of Revenue Bill (National Assembly Bills No.14 of 2024). Very soon, we are going to do allocation to our counties. Can we be very clear? Can we put these resolutions that we have in this Motion in that Bill so that we demand that historic pending bills be cleared before the end of this year? We can demand that all the existing projects be completed before new ones are done because that is another problem we are having in our counties. I suggest that, as much as we are going to pass this Bill, we should also put these recommendations that we are putting in here, on the county allocation that we are going to work on in the few coming days. I started by saying pending bills is a sign of failure in our system. We established an office called CoB. I want to be very clear that this office is not effective. This office is inefficient. The CoB keeps on lamenting. However, there are simple things that committees of this House have asked the CoB to do, and she is not doing."
}