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"id": 184445,
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"speaker_name": "Mr. Bett",
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"legal_name": "Franklin Kipng'etich Bett",
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"content": "Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I also want to join my colleagues in thanking the Minister and his Ministry for this presentation this afternoon. The loudest noise coming out of the local authorities is about allowances to the councillors to the extent that the councillors are not involved in any initiative to develop their local authorities. I would like to urge the Minister to stop for a moment, listen to these people and sort out this matter, so that we see how they can deliver services to our people. Otherwise, as of now, if you go to any local authority, the talk is allowances and salaries for councillors. It is a preoccupation, which is wasteful and does not help at all. So, I urge the Minister to look at this matter seriously, and note in the sense of providing Kshs5,000, but in a manner that will, hopefully, satisfy them and calm them down, so that they do not make noise until Christ comes back. The other area I want to address is town planning, which is lacking in the whole Republic, be it in cities, towns or trading centres, everything is in shambles. There are officers called \"Town Planners\" and \"City Planners\" who are paid salaries, yet there is nothing they are planning unless they are planning how to rob local authorities. When I talk of town planning, I mean planning for street lighting in all our towns. Lack of street lights provides an opportunity for thugs to attack and 2694 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES October 14, 2008 cause insecurity in our towns. We need street lighting to be done. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, there are no roads in most of our towns. If they are there, they are full of potholes. If they are there, they are just pools of water. One needs to go to Eastleigh and experience what I am saying. We need these roads for emergency situations. When there is fire, we need a road that is passable to easily access the place of fire. We need them for health reasons. We need to deliver sick people to hospital. We need them for the police, so that they can easily access and help victims of attacks by thugs. We also need water lines. When I talk of planning, we need water lines, so that it is known that there is a water line along a particular position in a city, town or trading centre. We also need sewer lines, so that we are clear. We do not need to - going back to roads - to talk about by-passes which we do not know how to use. Some people are talking of underground tunnels. You cannot make them now! I am simply asking: Can we plan today for many years to come? Let us not plan for today and tomorrow and stop. That is going to be a situation where we will not be estimating, extrapolating, into the future, so that we know that these towns--- Let us anticipate our population 50 years to come and see how to do our planning in terms of all the things I have listed such as lighting, roads, water and sewer lines. The other area that the Ministry should take care of is the issue of markets and bus parks. They are non-existent! They declared town or urban councils. When you declare a place as an urban council, what are the minimum conditions to take into account? When you declare a place a city council, what are the minimum conditions to take into account? This will ensure that we organise ourselves in a very good manner, otherwise we are going to cause a lot of mess in our cities. No wonder that now every city, town or trading centre is all rubbish; there is rubbish in every corner. Solid waste management is non-existent in the plan by the Ministry. We need to address the issue of waste management. Waste management is extremely important for purposes of obviating diseases and rats, which can also cause problems. However, there are also people who thrive - we must avoid them - on garbage dumps and they are always black. I do not know why they look black, but we need to avoid them because they are dangerous. That is the nature of our towns today. We need to remove such ugly sights from our towns by properly planning how to remove and dispose of waste in our towns. I also want to indicate that there is an urgent need in these authorities to start thinking of revenue generation. There are so many areas from where they can generate revenue, which can then go into the allowances of the councillors. I think the original concept of councillors paying themselves was good; they were not meant to draw their salaries or allowances from the Consolidated Fund. They were intended to be a government of their own. They were intended to generate their own revenue. The issue of education of councillors has been mentioned, and I have talked of the issue of initiative. These people need to have this, so that they can think of how to get extra money that they can use for supplying water, providing rental houses, providing car parks, managing household water or for billboards. Look at Nairobi; there are so many billboards; they are almost becoming an obstruction. Is the City Council of Nairobi getting money out of them, or are they just structures that have been fixed there to benefit another person and bring nothing to the Council? Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I want to say something about the councils. We have mutilated them; we have broken them until they are too small to sustain themselves! Even if we are able to convince them to generate revenue, they are too small! It is time to assess whether we still need them in that state! Do we need to go back and merge them so that the resources are used in a viable manner? Unless that is done, I find that some of those town and urban councils will just be October 14, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2695 there by name. Actually, we will be forced to fund them, whether we like it or not! So, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, where there are sewerage plants, we are wasting our time by not managing them well. We are also allowing that solid waste to be dumped all over the place and, in the process, they block our drainage systems! That is, again, another problem which all the councils should address. Why do we allow people to dump rubbish all over the place and, in the process, they block our drainage systems! That is why there are floods in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa. That is because nobody is being careful on the management of waste! People just take maize, eat and throw the maize cobs everywhere! Cigarette stumps are thrown everywhere! All that contributes to the blocking of our drainage systems. That also spreads respiratory diseases which are increasing by the day. That is as a result of not being able to manage our solid waste. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, with those very many remarks, I beg to support."
}