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{
    "id": 1472251,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1472251/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 373,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Oketch Gicheru",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, thank you for giving me this opportunity to support this amazing Bill by the great Senator of Nairobi and still my Secretary General (SG) in the ODM party. The mischief that the Senator of Nandi is trying to bring is that my SG now is the SG of the broad-based Government. That one is now akin to interfering with my certificate in 2027. So, I want to guarantee you that this is the SG of ODM who is still the custodian of my ticket. On a more serious note, this is a serious amendment. Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA) in the year 2022, just after the COVID-19 pandemic, I remember it was May. When they released its daily systems operations and dispatch analysis report, it indicated that at that time, the Kenyan demand for electricity had just hit 2,051 megawatts. I think that was the highest the country had had by that time. Remember that was when we were coming from the post-COVID era, immediately after the economic meltdown that pandemic brought. If you look at the demand against the national electricity capacity, we had overshot our capacity then. Even by 2018, the capacity in the national grid was 2,351 megawatts. There is something that that number showed us. This is important because the country is gearing towards trying to get to a 2030 national grid of about 15,000 megawatts. You find that it is only in Kenya that the electricity production cost by IPPs is low. Yet when it hits the national grid, we get the highest electricity tariffs that affect our people. Number two, some utilities that we have in our country, especially at a national level, are most well-resourced that cover their entire variable cost. Yet they remain loss- making utilities. To add salt to injury, the Kenyan taxpayer who goes to the market to get energy, for whichever reason, whether commercial or domestic, still faces the issue of low- quality service, even when it comes to that. We sometimes get people with serious problems with the specs of different meters that are not working. Different meters also do not reflect their payments. There are a lot of low-quality services that we still see in power consumption in this country. I cannot stress enough the importance of power in our country in terms of making sure that our national total productivity factor is in terms of the output that we get from every single citizen in this country. To give you perspective, a French child consumes 50 times more electricity today than a Kenyan child. A child born in the United States of America (USA) consumes 70 times more electricity than a child born in Kenya. Yet, competitively, across the globe, Kenya has placed itself at the age of using proper clean energy to the extent that almost 80 per cent of our energy is from renewable and clean sources. What is the problem? This is where I come back and laud my friend and my good SG, Senator for Nairobi, for dissecting the root cause of this problem. The root cause is a lack of public accountability and governance in terms of the production and consumption The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only.A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Director, Hansard and Audio Services,Senate."
}