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{
    "id": 1456729,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1456729/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 4119,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Buuri, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Mugambi Rindikiri",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I thank the Committee for aligning the Supplementary Budget with the Manifesto of the Government in place. The happenings of the last one month have shown us our failures. They have shown us where we have gone wrong. It takes sometimes a bit of suffering to realise the way forward. The economics that I learnt say that it is necessary to destroy or do away with what you have so that you have a better foundation – Tom Peters. Hon. Temporary Speaker, we are dealing with the issues of mismanagement of resources. I commend the Committee for critically looking at the areas where the possibility of mismanagement of resources that we have is quite high. I want to challenge the Committee that going forward, what we need to do as the basis for the allocation of the new budget for each Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), is the performance and utilisation of the resources that they were given in the prior years. We cannot be doing the same things year-in, year-out. When we call the cabinet secretaries, principal secretaries and accounting officers to come and do a presentation, we do not go in-depth as to how they have utilised the money that they have been given in the prior year. Any budget has three objectives: Short-term, mid-term and long-term. If we are targeting to create jobs, we must protect our industries, promote local industries and enhance productivity across the nation. We cannot grow manufacturing if we do not protect what we have locally and encourage the potential that we have. When the Government targets taxation on imported items, it is not because we want to target and tax our traders. The objective here is to promote the local industries and productivity. We have allowed Kenya to be a supermarket where we even import onions. We are about to import tomatoes, which is dangerous. Any amount of money collected from the taxpayers must go towards enhancing local manufacturing, and hence productivity. We have not been targeting very much on value addition. I have looked at this Budget, and what I see is a deliberate effort to enhance value addition in specific sectors like tea, coffee, dairy, leather industry and even cotton. I do not want to commend the Government but you see, that is a long-term objective and it has to start from somewhere. I want to commend the Committee because that is the foundation it has started looking at. There is a lot of misinformation out there. There is total lapse in civic education when it comes to the budgeting process. I took a lot of time to explain to the people that the Finance Bill is the tail end. What we need to start with is the Budget Policy Statement and then go wider to the public and talk about our budget and our budgeting processes so that our people will know what the Government is going through. The President of this Republic has never hesitated to say that he means well for this country, and he needs everybody on board so that we can travel this journey of enhancing the economy of this country. I ask the Chairman of the Committee that we need a lot of civic education so that we can correct the misinformation that is out there and especially, on what Parliament does. This Parliament has a responsibility of enhancing this economy in the short term, mid-term and long-term."
}