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"content": "Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to support this very important Vote for the Ministry of Education. As you have heard, this is a Ministry which is the pillar of any nation's growth, development and prosperity. So, it is very important that we all support the Ministry. I wanted to congratulate the Minister for being attentive and taking notes. The Minister, his Assistant, the Permanent Secretary and other officials in the Ministry are highly educated and trained people. It is time for the Ministry to develop some kind of criteria. Hon. Members have brought up issues in Parliament. They have talked about retirement age and so on. I have thought about it and I think we need to protect the position, because I eventually learnt that lecturers and professors in the universities are supposed to retire at the age of 70 years and above. We need to develop a criteria, so that we do not have negative publicity. When somebody is doing a very important job as what the Minister, the Assistant Minister and the Permanent Secretary are doing, it is good for the public to know that we need a professor in the Ministry of Education as a Permanent Secretary because that is the source of what we need to do for a country. We cannot talk about engineers, quantity surveyors and building experts like myself without talking about the Ministry of Education. I want to congratulate the Minister and also thank him because he has been very keen on what we have been discussing in this House, after we came back from the chaos that we went through at the beginning of the year. We raised here an issue about the recruitment of teachers. He made a promise here and went and acted on it. We recently talked about the issue of recruitment and improvement of terms of service for teachers. He has assured us that they are acting on that. I think this is key. There is no point of saying that we are doing this or that when the teachers who are supposed to be taking care of the children are not taken care of. In fact, many of them grumble a lot. For us who go to schools and meet the teachers, they grumble a lot that they are taking care of the children for free. I think the composition of the top rank in the Ministry is reason enough for us to say that the Ministry should be more proactive and come up with schemes or programmes which can drive the country. The issue of saying that you cannot recruit teachers or increase their salaries because you depend on Treasury should be something of the past. In his contribution, the Minister was thanking development partners. The Free Primary Education Programme was introduced in a hurry, but we got a lot of support from outside and there is no reason why we cannot say or look around to see whether we can recruit teachers for our schols. It should not be a perennial problem. That way, we will not keep on saying that we want to recruit 6,000 teachers or we are chasing a horse which has already bolted. So, we will not be able to achieve what we intend to achieve as a country. A number of years back during the Moi Regime, we did not have much to do with the Chinese but now, with the Kibaki Government, we are dealing with the Chinese and I can see that there is a lot going on. When I was working in the Civil Service, we did not want to recognise that Chinese contractors are here. If you look at the roads which are being constructed by the Chinese, for example the Nairobi-Nakuru-Kisumu Road, it is being done well. Why can we not look for funding rather than just depend on people who used to depend on us. The British depended on the revenue that they were collecting from us to survive, and we are still following them, and want to identify with them. It is time we thought more seriously and moved forward. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, people are talking about hardship areas. There are Maragoli Hills and we have two schools there. I have been wishing that we had a way of treating those areas as hardship areas, because when I go to those schools, Musunguti and Kisingiru, I do not feel like going there again because of the terrain. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, when you go to those places, you do not feel like 2514 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES October 7, 2008 going there again and yet, teachers are supposed to commute every morning and evening. One day, somebody from the Ministry of Education or the Teachers Service Commission was saying: \"You know these days, teachers are paid house allowances and other allowances and they should be able to stay where they are.\" But you know in human nature, you cannot force somebody to stay where he or she does not like. So, there should be options. I want to just very quickly mention something about the TSC. In Kenya at the moment, we have got people who have retired and yet they still look young. I think they are all over the country. We have talked a number of times about decentralising the TSC. We cannot be talking about the welfare of teachers and then expect them to be coming to the TSC Headquarters in Nairobi everytime they have issues. I do not think we are being fair to teachers. Even issues of promotions take a long time because of bureaucracy. I wish with the kind of talent that we have in the Ministry now, we can think outside the box and decentralise the TSC. We should be able to get many commissioners all over the country to run offices out there with the control from the head office. The Kenya National Library Service is supposed to be complimenting what we are doing to improve the literacy level in this country. I have been wondering why the Kenya National Library Service is not under the Ministry of Education. As we talk about funding the national libraries to have branches in every constituency, we would like to attach them to schools and not to the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development. I highly recommend that, through the Chair, the Minister discusses with his colleagues to see how the Kenya National Library Service can be under his docket. There is the issue of transition. We have had a lot of changes. Once, we have had the Ministry of Basic Education, Higher Education and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Now, we have the Ministry of Education and that of Higher Education, Science and Technology. I have been trying to think about transition. The Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports talked about co-operating with the Ministry of Education. But the way I see it myself, the Ministry of Education should be at the centre of co-ordinating all that. As we talk about computers in schools, ICT business and so on, we need the Ministry of Information and Communications. We need the Ministry of Energy to provide power so that we can be computer literate in our schools. That is very important. I think we should look at it in a bigger way. Okay, I know there are Committees in the Cabinet for infrastructure and so on. Why can we not have one chaired by an able Minister like this one, to put together all that kind of stuff? With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}