Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 1564144,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1564144/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 264,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. (Prof.) Kamar",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 33,
        "legal_name": "Margaret Jepkoech Kamar",
        "slug": "margaret-kamar"
    },
    "content": "Recently, I met a young fellow whose idea was to use his mother's telephone for a programme that merges M-Pesa and this would be much better for the banks. This is a Form 4 student. I had to persuade him to go and complete his Form 4 first because he is the boy is brilliant; he gives you ideas. In fact, he was babbling with ideas. I told him that when he completes Form 4, I will give him a mentor. The reason was that I did not want him distracted, but how many parents have stopped their children from being creative because we want to finish the Form 4 first or we want to finish the degree first? There are many. Our children are extremely creative. I still keep asking because we asked this when I was the Minister for Science and Technology but we did not get an answer. Who exactly came up with the idea of M-Pesa? No one wants to talk about that because banks say it is because of their intellectual property but we had heard of young people who were complaining that they were the ones who came up with the idea. Whether it is true or not, it is another story. This is because there was no protection and there was no law to protect anybody's ideas. We are grateful that the law on intellectual property rights had arrived. However, this law on intellectual property rights in this country came very, very late, in the late 90s. I remember I was in the University at that time and when we came up with the intellectual property rights, it was one of its kind because no other university had it. We did it to protect the idea of one Professor whose idea was almost stolen by a Belgian because they had the law and we did not have such a law. I therefore congratulate my colleague because this is going to protect the ideas and it is going to protect the creativity of our people. Creativity, skill and talent development is something that is natural. It is in the heart of the African behaviour. A few hours ago, you talked of the creativity of beads and what the beads mean. You said that no African woman or man wears a bead that has no meaning. Everything has a meaning, yet nobody has accurately documented the meaning of those beads. The African culture is extremely rich. It has creativity inculcated in it but documentation has not been done and it has not been protected. The Bill by Sen. Oketch Gicheru will nurture and protect creativity. I thank him for these many Kenyan things have not been protected. In the North Rift, we use a lot of beadwork from the Maasai Community during weddings, especially the cross-cultural weddings. In cross-race weddings, the beadworks are used to identify our girls. We end up using Maasai beads without telling them that those beads are from the Maasai. We do not even discuss where they have come from, yet we know that they have originated from there. These are things that need to be protected, and they need to be built. When you look at this Bill, you will realize that a lot has not been protected by law. The Maasai beads are not called Maasai beads. We just refer to them as beads. What we do not know is that somebody can discover that loophole. A good example is the"
}