Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 1443366,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1443366/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 136,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Chesang",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13578,
        "legal_name": "Chesang Allan Kiprotich",
        "slug": "chesang-allan-kiprotich"
    },
    "content": "In terms of corruption, I concur with fellow Senators that the EACC has failed us. The Government should work on strengthening institutions that are tasked to fight corruption. Apart from being strict, they should also empower these institutions. Most of these institutions are normally under-budgeted for. That is why they cannot achieve their mandate in pushing the agendas. Talk about the police, they do not have the motivation because they are underpaid in comparison to the security they provide to this country. I believe that is a problem that should be addressed. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, let me talk about corruption in our county governments. This also applies to the Senate. For example, committees such as the County Public Accounts Committee (CPAC) or County Public Investments and Special Funds Committee (CPISFC) call county government officials and our governors here. If am the Chairperson of the Committee on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and my governor is called, then I will go to that committee as a friend of the committee. We are looking at serious issues of the county government, which we are allowed to oversight. However, we cannot oversight when we are in these committees. That is why we are proposing amendments to the Standing Orders, so that the Senators of specific county governments are called by this particular committee, and can co-chair them when these governors come so that we can ensure that we provide oversight to our people. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I also want to speak about public participation. When you look at public participation, I can tell you that what contributed to the Gen Zs going to the streets is public participation. I am 100 percent sure that public participation was not well done by this Government. I will give you an example. We have Bills and policies that we are making, and when it comes to public participation, as committees, we normally write in the newspapers. I can assure you, if you look at the complaints that the Gen Zs were making, they were not only from the Gen Zs in this country, we had our children from Canada, Australia and other countries putting up their grievances. This shows that it is not only those who are here who want to participate in matters affecting this country. We have our youths from all over the world who always want to participate yet we do our public participation by going to hold barazas in the villages and manually going to different counties to get views and submissions. There is one stakeholder that I requested for submissions from, and the submissions were brought by a pick-up to the Committee. You can imagine how much time we need to read documents and the logistics that they used to bring all these documents to our committees. It even makes it very hard for us, as Members, to go through all these papers and stuff. That is why, as the Chairperson of the ICT Committee, we are proposing to this Government to create a tool to participate. We can have an online public participation. Even our proceedings here in this House, we will add more value when we engage Kenyans. We will add more value when Kenyans listen to us live and can also participate or make comments on our live debates and live policies that we created in this House. So, we will be learning from the people that we represent and we will add more value listening to their views. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Director, Hansard and AudioServices, Senate."
}