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"content": "Mercedes Benz vehicles are very expensive. Whenever they see a Government officer riding in such a vehicle, they form the opinion that it is total misuse of money. So, let us get another vehicle model that does not raise eyebrows. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I will not mind being driven in a Nissan Sunny car. It was my first car. I like it very much. I will not mind at all. The most important thing is to have some means of transport to convey you from point âAâ to point âBâ, and not to be driven in a particular make of a vehicle. The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance could actually go further and adopt some of the policies that are in use in a few other countries, where, except for officers in their Armed Forces, other Government officers have no vehicles attached to them. All vehicles are in a pool. If you want a vehicle, you request for one through a transport officer, who will then allocate you a car for a specific purpose and a particular journey. That is happening. Even at the district level, all vehicles should be in one pool. No particular officer should have a vehicle. Any Government officer who wishes to use a vehicle, should apply to the transport officer, so that he is given a vehicle for that particular purpose. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we can even go a step further. The Government took away vehicles from officers in Job Groups âRâ downwards. Those officers were given transport allowance. It is high time that we did the same for officers in Job Groups âRâ and above. They can also be given transport allowance and, therefore, they will not need to have specific vehicles assigned to them. What I am saying is that we must support the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance in his effort to curb misuse of Government resources, so that this negative attitude towards mali ya umma can come to an end. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, what we are debating are the accounts for the year 2004/2005. We are now in the year 2009. As I said at the beginning, we are now reading history. We should computerise our Government accounts, so that come the end of the financial year, within a period of one month, you are able to extract accounts. Banks today can produce accounts on a daily basis. Banks know their assets and liabilities at the closure of the day. If we were to computerise all aspects of Government accounts, this would be possible. Even the issue of over-expenditure would not arise. If the accounts are computerised and you try to incur some expenses that are not voted for, the system will not allow it. So, we need to go further and find out why we are reading historical data, instead of real accounts. However, as I said, this is a big improvement compared to past cases. During the Ninth Parliament, we debated accounts that were more than ten years old. So, a reduction of the number of years from 10 to four is an improvement, but I think we can do much better. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, another area that I would like to speak about is that of local authorities. Some local authorities have never produced accounts for the last 30 to 40 years of their existence. It makes it difficult to even know what the liabilities and assets of those local authorities are. Therefore, a lot of misuse and abuse occurs in these local authorities."
}