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{
    "id": 1459642,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1459642/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 264,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Funyula, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Dr) Ojiambo Oundo",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "along that things were not well yet we remained adamant, believing that we had the power of the barrel of a gun, and that we would beat everybody into submission and get ourselves here. Naturally, we have to approve the second Supplementary Bill to enable the country move on. Without it, the Government will shut down and everything will come to an end, and Kenyans will suffer. However, we support the Bill knowing very well that this is going to slow down the economy. This is going to lead Kenya into a terrible recession, and the little gains that we ever made, starting from the days of President Emilio Mwai Kibaki, are going to be rolled back drastically. In a Third World country like Kenya where the Government plays an important role in the locomotion of the economy and is not spending, there is no economy, and nothing will grow. If you read various commentaries from the World Bank, Environment and Development (ED) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), they have a very gleam view – a negative view – on the economic growth of this country in the current calendar year. That is simply because there is no possibility of an economic impetus that will allow the economy to grow. This Supplementary Budget is all about cuts. We need to ask ourselves very hard questions as a country. The most interesting thing is, with the serious cuts in the development budge, what will employees of the State Departments, SAGAS and MDAs do? Will they simply be walking to their offices, read newspapers, go to social media pages and do nothing? Without any development funds, what do you do with the engineers that the Chair of the Budget and Appropriation Committee has talked about? What do you do with them? What do you do with the water engineers? If you cut a percentage of that, it runs to several billions of shillings in the water harvesting programme. What will the civil engineers in the Ministry of Water do? If you have cut approximately Ksh2 billion on Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVETs) institutions, what will they do? These institutions are the hallmark of Vision 2030. Medium-Term Plan 3 (MTP3) and Medium-Term Plan 4 (MTP4) was to equip Kenyans with skills to ensure that they participate in the manufacturing sector. What are we going to do to achieve the target of 15 per cent GDP contribution from manufacturing if we do not invest in skills acquisition? Are we really serious in what we do? I would go on and on. The massive cuts in the education sector means that we are not going to have money to allocate to infrastructure development yet by 2026 we expect a transition to the new education system as the pupils in Grade Eight will be moving to the senior secondary schools. By next year, many schools in the rural Kenya will not be having classrooms for Grade 9. What are we going to do to house these boys and girls who are so fired up and energetic enough that they want to go to school yet a whopping Ksh10 billion has been taken away from teacher resource management? It means that we retool and retrain the existing teachers to enable them handle secondary school and senior secondary schools, be it Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) or those other various pathways, it is no longer going to be there. We are going to limp through. We will get teachers who are ill-trained and unprepared to manage the affairs of that particular category. It is indeed sad. Many of us wonder why in the Recurrent Expenditure, funds that were allocated to secondary education amounting to Ksh5 billion have been chopped off. Is it for capitation or quality assurance? What are we talking about? In the primary education sector, Ksh1.9 billion was reduced. If we cannot invest in education, are we not killing these generations permanently or what are we doing? I have never supported supplementary budgets but I just want to appeal to the Chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee that if there is going to be any change of fortune in The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}