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{
    "id": 1569768,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1569768/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 236,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Turkana East, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Nicholas Ng’ikor",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Speaker, for giving me this chance to add my voice to this important Bill. If we flash back to the Nyayo era, the work of extension officers was one of the services that the Government prioritised. This is because of the support that these officers gave to our farmers from the national level all the way to the village level. During those days, we had these officers in every village. Unfortunately, I do not know what happened to this country because these important services have slowly been phased out. At the moment, you cannot find these officers anywhere in our sub-locations, locations or divisions. Where I come from, we used to lose a lot of livestock because of drought. During those days, extension officers would give farmers early warning alerts, which would enable them to strategize on how to save their livestock. Nowadays, farmers are caught off guard and end up losing a lot of livestock because they are not prepared for what is coming. Our farmers need education. They need to know new farming techniques. Because of lack of these agricultural extension services, they cannot get these new technologies. We allocate money in this House to hire teachers for our schools, so that our children can get education. It is the same thing we need to do to our farmers. They need to be educated. They also need to get new technologies so that they can plant the right crops at the right time. By doing so, we can get enough food and avoid giving our people relief food like what we do in some parts of this country like North Eastern, Turkana and Samburu. If agricultural extension services can be taken closer to the people, they can do a lot of work and produce food in all the sectors of agriculture, livestock and fishing. Because they lack these services, they cannot produce food. As the world changes, climate change is coming in. These people do not know how to go around climate change because they lack these kinds of services. In our colleges, there are too many students who normally finish these courses in agriculture, but they loiter in the villages with all that knowledge. We need to support this Bill, so that we can hire these officers to provide services to our farmers. By doing so, we can continue talking about agriculture being the backbone of this country. This died when agriculture was devolved to the counties. Do you think it has just died? We need to strengthen the Bill and come up with the right ways of how these services will be handled by the county governments and the national Government. This will enable us to ensure that we do not have any gap that may bring confusion between the two levels of government. The agricultural extension services officers used to render services in our divisions. We have wards nowadays. For example, we have 30 wards in my county. If each ward can have an agricultural extension officer, our farmers can get more knowledge and improve their farming. With those few remarks, I support the Bill."
}