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{
    "id": 1545687,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1545687/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 242,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Cheruiyot",
    "speaker_title": "The Senate Majority Leader",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13165,
        "legal_name": "Aaron Kipkirui Cheruiyot",
        "slug": "aaron-cheruiyot"
    },
    "content": "2025/2026, 3.8 per cent 2026/2027, 3.5 per cent 2027/2028, in line with a fiscal consolidation path. Sen. Tabitha Mutinda, this is what I was talking about. This percentage must work out to 55 per cent, but this may not work out to 55 per cent by 2030. What is a guarantee? I know this because I have been a member of the Finance and Budget Committee. The 3.5 per cent we are talking about if you check our reports for around 2020; these were the figures that we were talking about then. They are aspirational. There is no discipline to live through them. There is no guarantee that the National Treasury will stick to these recommendations unless we make them law. That is a challenge that I am giving this Committee. What have we learned over the years? If we continue to do these reports, we will be happy to say that these are projected percentages. The only way this will become a reality is the day that we put it into law. Then, after we have closed all the paths for borrowing beyond certain levels, we will come and have an adult conversation in this House and ask ourselves difficult questions, including our colleagues in the National Assembly who keep on growing their National Government Constituency Development Fund (NG-CDF) allocations. They will be faced straight in the eye and be informed that they have to choose whether to fund your institutions where their constituents go or grow your NG-CDF allocation. So long as we leave it as an aspirational figure, we are not going to slay this debt situation. Therefore, if there is a duty that we are being called to in this current session of Parliament, just the same way the Ninth and the Tenth Parliaments were urged to fight and ensure that Kenya gets a new Constitution. The call of this House from the people of the Republic of Kenya today, Sen. Maanzo, is more than anything that they want to hear your voice regarding this issue of debt. We must be clear and we must not go out of old paths that are tried and tested and whose results you already know. We must be willing to bite the bullet and chart new territories that are difficult, but are the only paths that can put this country back to economic recovery. Otherwise, Sen. Maanzo, if we continue the route that we continue to take today, it will be recorded, and it will never be recorded that you sat on the minority side. It is likely that you are a leader in Kenya at that particular point; a powerful Senator and Member of Parliament, when we watch our country sink deeper and further into debt and do nothing about it. This conversation cannot only be sustained through a review or a report by our Finance and Budget Committee on the 2025 Medium-Term Debt Management Strategy, which is a proposal from the National Treasury. Sen. Maanzo, you must ask yourself, how can you expect to find a solution from the people who put us into trouble in the first place? Are we not being foolish as Parliament? We have a whole research unit in the name of the Parliamentary Budget Office, made up of competent people who I have worked with. They are intelligent young men and women who at the height of the protest here in June when we passed that Motion as a House - it is unfortunate because we have not followed through with many of the recommendations. Sen. Tabitha Mutinda, you know that one of the recommendations of that particular Motion was to have a conversation on debt guided by the Parliamentary Budget Office, not the National Treasury. So we tell the National Treasury, \"It is clear you have demonstrated to the people of Kenya that you are not able to show prudence in financial The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Director, Hansard and AudioServices, Senate."
}