Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 1517347,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1517347/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 267,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Sifuna",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13599,
        "legal_name": "Sifuna Edwin Watenya",
        "slug": "sifuna-edwin-watenya"
    },
    "content": "He is famously known for dreaming of a city in a forest. In an interview just a few months before he passed away, he said his one biggest regret was that he was not able to achieve that dream. Many people can still remember how Mombasa Road, all the way through to Uhuru Highway used to look. It was a boulevard with very nice mature trees in the median and also on the side of the road. However, subsequent developments have come, including the construction of the Expressway, that have ensured that all those trees that used to be in those places were cut down. We as a leadership of Nairobi are extremely concerned with the state of the environment in the City. These include some of the issues that have been brought up by Sen. Mungatana, including continued closure or barring of residents from accessing Uhuru Gardens and Central Park, which is part of Uhuru Park. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, in April 2024, the Cabinet Secretary for Defence, Hon. Aden Duale, appeared before the plenary of this House. He committed to this House that he was going to hand back Uhuru Park, Central Park and Uhuru Gardens back to the people of Nairobi. The situation that has been described by Sen. Mungatana is something I can attest to. If you go to Langata Road on a Saturday, when ordinarily many people do their laundry or household chores, you will find many women who do those chores have nowhere to sit. They sit along the road and it is quite an unsightly thing to see, not to mention lack of facilities for the people of Nairobi to relax. Therefore, we must continue to call on the Ministry of Defence, because these two parks were taken over by the Ministry of Defence in February 2022, and they were being renovated by the military. The Cabinet Secretary himself committed here. You heard him say that he was going to do it the next day, which was 18th April, 2024. We are almost coming to a year since that pronouncement by the Cabinet Secretary and that situation is unacceptable. There was another baffling piece of news that I saw this week. The President told us that they had planted 750 million trees over a period of 12 months in 2024. For many of us, the math was not “ mathing ”, as they say in the streets, because that would translate to two million trees per day. Two million trees being planted per day is not something you can hide. We hope that these figures can be backed up by those who participated in tree-planting."
}