Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 1561746,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1561746/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 534,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Molo, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Kuria Kimani",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "bottom of the pyramid and the real hustlers of this country, training fees for bodaboda riders remain too high for them to afford. As the Departmental Committee on Transport and Infrastructure retreats to relook at how to bring this Bill back, it will look at affirmative action to make sure we reduce the cost of training. There are matters that are being raised by the Members in this House, for example, the accidents that are caused by bodaboda riders. Some of them clear Form IV or Class VIII and the easiest business to start becomes that of a bodaboda rider. If the training fees were reasonable enough, then that particular rider would be motivated to go and do a bodaboda riding training before they start riding. The bodaboda sector is very important to our economy. I dare say we cannot live without it in this country. It is our last mile connectivity in our transport. When you want to go to the deepest parts of our villages or urban areas, where some of the roads are small, we rely on those bodaboda riders. When people fall sick, they take them to hospitals. If there is a theft in a particular village or any other security matters, the first respondents, most of the time, are not even police officers, but bodaboda riders because most of them operate for 24 hours. This is, therefore, an area that is critical to our economy that we need to protect and provide affirmative action, so that those riders can have training and better access to safety gears such as helmets and reflectors. If you check around, especially in Nairobi, you will notice most of the bikes have their lights on with a yellow circle at the front, including during the day. Those are electric motorcycles. They have saved fuel consumption or the cost of running those bodaboda by more than 50 per cent. This is as a result of policy directions that were made in this House. The Finance Act of 2020 provided for zero-rating of electric motorcycles and their parts. This, fundamentally, has reduced the cost of electric motorcycles so much so that I have seen multinationals such as Uber and MOGO invest in them through venture capitalists in that particular entity. Therefore, you have seen the profitability of bodaboda riders, especially those who render delivery services in Nairobi. They use electric motorcycles. We hope that the private sector will take this further to our villages, so that the bodaboda business can be more profitable to those young people who are hardworking. As much as we want to blame our bodaboda riders for the accidents, motorists have also contributed to this. Most of the time and especially around roundabouts, we squeeze out some of them. You find some of them carrying a lady, and she gets scared because there is a"
}