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{
    "id": 1483183,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1483183/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 347,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Funyula, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Dr) Ojiambo Oundo",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "We are not of yesterday. That is when I met a library. We had books in classrooms that were given by the Government, but it was my first time to see a library where books were arranged in a line and on shelves. Since then, I fell in love with books. And if there is anything that I like to do whenever time allows, is to read. If there is anything I commit all the time to do is to read. Again, when we went to universities, obviously the University of Nairobi because the others were small colleges then, we had libraries like the Jomo Kenyatta Library, Memorial Library and the college libraries. I am trying to say that libraries are repositories of information. They are a source of knowledge. They provide everything. Hon. Temporary Speaker, again, taking our children to the Kenya National Library Services in Upper Hill also became an easy outing. If you were committed, going to work on a Saturday during school holidays, you would drop your children in the library, pay Ksh20 by then, and let them go and study, while you attend to other things. Even when we were doing our thesis, we would go to various libraries here. Macmillan Library was very good because it had some old literature that could build your literature review over a period of time. The drafters of the new Constitution of 2010 had very noble ideas, but I still believe that they overloaded the counties without giving them adequate capacity and political goodwill to run those activities. As part of the conditional grant, in the last two to three financial years, some of the money that was reserved for the Kenya National Library Services was taken to the counties. Of course, everybody will wonder: What have the counties done with that money? I also join my colleagues to tell Kenyans that it is good to read because knowledge becomes stale over time. Whatever knowledge you learnt in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or even as late as during the COVID-19 times, you will realise that so many new developments have come up. You need to refresh yourself. We need to encourage the art of reading. How do we do that? We need to have books or a central place where somebody can go sit down, read, or even borrow a book, read and return it in exchange for another one. When we were growing up, we had a series of storybooks or fiction books. Fiction books expand your imagination. They push your thinking to the horizon; that unbelievable things can happen. They also improve vocabulary and diversity of language. 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."
}