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"id": 187328,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/187328/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Poghisio",
"speaker_title": "The Minister for Information and Communications",
"speaker": {
"id": 202,
"legal_name": "Samuel Losuron Poghisio",
"slug": "samuel-poghisio"
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"content": " Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to contribute to this Motion. I would like to thank my colleagues who have spoken ahead of me in support of this Motion. My friend, who spoke immediately before me, spoke in a language which made some of us to \"float\". I hope that it was formal Kiswahili that he was speaking. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, it is very important that I state very clearly that it is good to have this Motion brought to the House by the hon. Member. It is important that we all look at it very critically. It is very easy to support it, but I do have issues with it. We must separate formal leadership from informal leadership. If we formalise the informal leadership, then we lose the role it plays within the villages. It is also dangerous for us to provide for payments or remunerations for village elders or village leadership. The current consultative approach, where they are actually used as consultants and play a role that is so balanced, far exceeds the idea of putting them on a payroll and causing them to depend on hand-outs or monies. That even causes them to be corrupt sometimes. It will reach a situation in the village where the state of \"he who pays the piper calls the tune\" will come about. The corrupt will corrupt our good elders and our informal leadership. That is my fear for going this particular way. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, another fear I have is the budgetary implications of this Motion. It is huge. There are more villages in certain places but overall, this is going to exceed the number of chiefs, assistant chiefs, District Commissioners (DCs) and Provincial Commissioners (PCs) and, therefore, going to be a situation we will have to deal with in terms of raising the necessary budget for it. I know that we have employed so many assistant chiefs and broken down the sub-locations to such small pieces, that we have actually created a situation where we continue to have more and more people at the bottom. It is going to complicate the way we budget. All our monies will, therefore, go for payment of salaries and development will, therefore, be compromised. That is my other fear. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would also like to look at the possibility of us multi- tasking the people who are already there rather than trying to create new employment for elders. I can imagine for most of us, in areas where the elderships actually are very serious offices. The elders are already senior than the chiefs, assistant chiefs and DCs, because of their status. So, if we bring them to a level where they will be earning less money, the power that they have out of being natural opinion leaders in those particular areas will be watered down or diminished because they will belong to a scale. So, what used to be a senior person will become a lower person because of scale. They will start reasoning that, you earn less than me, therefore, you are at the bottom of this chain. So, we risk compromising the existing natural leadership that even chiefs, assistant chiefs and DCs fear and respect when they go to the villages. I do not know at this point in time whether we should actually be going this way. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, there is another category though, who are called the \"Mkasas\". This is a different category. If we are talking of village elders, this is a different July 30, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2215 category. The \"Mkasa\" are a different kind of people. They are actually seconded to the chiefs. They are the foot soldiers. They are the ones who deal with cases. They know how to draw their allowances from the people they deal with. That is a different category of village leadership. The definition must be clear. Are we dealing with our traditional village elders? Are the elders who belong in another category the ones we are now trying to formalise or are we dealing with the ones who are already so commercialised that they can now be given a formal salary? Where I come from, we also have people known as the KPR. They are actually Kenya Police Reservists. They do a wonderful job where they are, but they are not paid anything. They do a lot of security work. In fact, they keep most of the security in those border towns. The debate on whether to pay them or not to pay them has always been there. I wish they could be paid some little allowances, but then do you get to compromise their performance by these payments or not? I wish we could actually pay them and give them good uniforms. We could train them and allow them to perform their duties well, but the reason as to why they are voluntary is that they are reserves, so that they can actually do this out of their own will, and not to be compromised by money. I still believe that they should be paid or assisted through some other forms. So, those are my fears. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, coming to the Motion itself, I would like to caution that, the fact that our chiefs and assistant chiefs have failed us in certain areas, does not necessarily mean that we need to multiply that problem. I think they are getting away without accounting for their time. What happens to the baraza gatherings that they used to have on a weekly basis? What happened to the visits they used to make to the villages? They no longer do it. So, what we are seeking to do now is trying to make up for them. We are saying: \"Let us bring in more people to help deal with the inefficiency of our chiefs and assistant chiefs\". If we build the efficiency of our chiefs and assistant chiefs to where they actually do what they are supposed to do, we will reduce the need for a lot of these other people we are trying to employ. In my view, this Motion is trying to create employment through the backdoor. Of course, employment has its own laws. Employment will, of course, require assent when it comes to getting money from the Exchequer, et cetera. This is seeking to create employment for more than a million people in this particular one time at the particular level, depending on the number of villages that we create. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, while I sympathise with this Motion brought by my honourable colleague, who is my former student, I also feel that I need to bring some of these things to the fore. Let us not, truly, compromise the traditional leadership that is in place. Let us not formalise what is informal. Let us not commercialise our leadership at the level that earns respect out of simply being born in the area and being respected. I think it is worth more than money. With a really heavy heart, I beg to oppose the Motion."
}