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{
    "id": 1520654,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1520654/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 248,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kitui Central, WDM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Dr) Makali Mulu",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "he is not dressed in a suit and a tie. Why can we not have our own dress code? We can use one of our cultures – the Maasai people have mastered their own culture – to generate our national dress that will be tailored to suit our weather conditions. If we take our cultural practices seriously, we stand to benefit from them. Our food is part of culture. Every part of this country has its own traditional foodstuffs. High Blood Pressure, high blood sugar and heart-related diseases are lifestyle diseases. In the olden days, very few people had those diseases. People used to eat traditional foodstuffs which have been tested over time. In most cases, those foodstuffs had very minimal harm to peoples’ bodies. So, if we fight back new trends and start appreciating our old cultural foodstuffs, we will spend less money in hospitals. Hon. Temporary Speaker, another matter is respect. I am sure where you come from, if you met a young person in the olden days, there was a way in which you were expected to greet him that demonstrated respect for your culture. In the olden days, where I come from, if an old person boarded a matatu, it was expected that a young person would give them their seat. However, if you board a matatu today, you are likely to find a small boy of about 15 years seated while an old man of about 50 or 60 years is standing. Such a scenario will not surprise you today. A small boy can be seated next to a grandmother but the grandmother cannot request the boy to give her his seat. So, in the olden days, our culture demonstrated respect for the elderly. However, we have been losing that over time. I wish we could go back to some of the good cultural practises. They are still there. Most communities in this country take initiation as a mentorship programme. As young boys go through the initiation process, they are also mentored on how to behave when they become men. We are now losing that culture by taking our kids to hospital where they are cut. We then go back home and nobody tells them how to behave now that they have been cut and they are adults. That is why we have many challenges. The last point I want to make so that I give room for the next business, is how we used to celebrate good times when we were happy. Some cultures had traditional dances and other ways of celebrating when you got married or when a child was born. However, we are losing some of those good original ways of celebrating our achievements because of modern lifestyles. I wish we could ring-fence such cultural practices through this Bill, so that they continue to prevail and be practiced like in the olden days. I salute the Maasai community because they have maintained and sustained their culture to date. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I intend to propose amendments to this Bill during the Committee of the whole House stage to ensure that each community’s culture is respected as provided for in our Constitution. With those many remarks, I support."
}