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{
"id": 189450,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/189450/?format=api",
"text_counter": 191,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Kajwang",
"speaker_title": "The Minister of State for Immigration and Registration of Persons",
"speaker": {
"id": 164,
"legal_name": "Gerald Otieno Kajwang",
"slug": "otieno-kajwang"
},
"content": " Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, let me start where Mr. Chanzu left off. Sometimes, we may build a very large 1914 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES July 16, 2008 city, which will house everything and not be able to manage it. We are bringing everything to Nairobi and withdrawing wealth from the entire country and pulling it to Nairobi. If you are not careful, every young man and woman who finishes Form Four will want to come to Nairobi. That is the only place where there is a possibility of employment. Every expert and professional will want to come to Nairobi, because that is where they can practise. If you are not careful, every investor will want to invest in Nairobi, because that is where the facilities are and the cost of production is low. Sooner or later, we will clog Nairobi. Already we have clogged it with too many vehicles, and too much pollution in the rivers. So, sometimes, we may say that we want to manage the chaos that we have already created by attracting everybody to Nairobi, but we must also think in terms of what we can do to create investments elsewhere, so that people can move out of Nairobi. Unless we do that, Nairobi will not be able to sustain all of us. Let us take it as it is and try to sort out the problems that we have. I do not envy my friend, Mr. M. kilonzo, because this is a huge task. First of all, we have the largest slum in Africa and it is not very nice. Mathare and Kibera Slums are some of the largest in Africa. The Minister for Housing told me sometimes back, before he was re-appointed that, in fact, if he was given some Kshs2 billion from the Treasury every year, he would be able to wipe out the Kibera Slum in four years. I asked him: Why must you look for money from the Treasury, when you can get it from Kenyans? So long as you float attractive road or housing bonds, people will buy them just the same way they did with the Safaricom Initial Public Offer (IPO), the other day. Then, he can wipe out the slum in less than four years and also generate a lot of money to develop Nairobi. I heard my friend, Mr. Chanzu, talk of coming from Ongata Rongai and Karen. Some of you have not tried to come from Komarock and Umoja. You will take two hours on that road. First of all, you will burn the fuel that we cannot afford, several times over. You will also waste several man hours just to move from one part of the City to another, which would ordinarily take you ten minutes, if there was no traffic. Although that road is called Outer Ring Road, it is no longer an outer ring. Now, it is inside the City. But even before we build the by-passes, somebody should think of a dual carriage way from the airport to the GSU Headquarters, just to ease traffic. It is a bottle-neck to a lot of development. Unless we do something about Kangundo Road, nobody will invest there. This is because you have to wake up at 5.00 a.m., to hit that road at 5.45 a.m to be able to reach town on time. If you hit Kangundo Road at 6.00 a.m., you can be sure that you will be late to arrive in town. That is the kind of waste of man hours, fuel and all under frustration. When you reach in the city, you are not in a form of mind to do business. You start quarrelling everybody because you are tense and annoyed. People will have abused you on the road and you will have done the same to them. When you come to the city, there is not enough parking. If you want to do any shopping in this city, you need to hire a driver to go round with your car as you do the shopping, because there is no other formula to it. Nobody has developed any parking in this city. Why is this so? I do not know. The Nairobi City Council (NCC) knows that it is its duty to provide parking. They may not have the money, but they can enter into some private/public partnership with people who can develop parking in the City centre. Look at that parking on both sides of Kenya Re-insurance Plaza. We can do a lot of parking there if we only invited investors and gave them those pieces of land to develop ten or 15 storeys of parking space. That can absorb a lot of traffic. As we do parking on top and under, we can also do shopping on the ground floor. There is nothing wrong with that. We have to change the way we think. There is a lot of money in this world. People just want opportunities to invest. But if you come to invest in Kenya, like that plot opposite Nyayo House and Barclays Plaza--- If you sell that land at Kshs1.5 billion like it was sold recently, I am sure it was given to somebody for free and that person sold it to the National Social Security Fund July 16, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 1915 (NSSF) and the NSSF sold it at Kshs1.5 billion to an investor. The investor, definitely, will not like it because the amount he spend on land alone takes all his investment whatever you create there, becomes very expensive, whether it is housing, parking or hotel. The city must know that when an investor comes in here with money, you must give them some lease or some land for free. You get that in Dubai, Britain, Germany and other places. You put your money there and then develop the facilities that this country needs. I am sure that the Minister for Nairobi Metropolitan Development, in conjunction with the Minister for Lands, is going to remove the brokers on land. They get land allocations and broker them for some money. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, if somebody has not developed what he had promised to develop when he applied for the land and the grant said that you will develop a hotel in two years and yet you have not done so, then you have broken the conditions of the grant. So, you need to surrender the land back to the Government so that somebody else who has the money can do something else on it. That is the law and that should be the practice. This idea that people coming to Kenya must first buy the land and then invest on it makes our housing so expensive. In fact, 50 per cent of the cost of housing, even in Kilimani where they are now doing apartments, is the cost of land. Why should it be so? We are buying apartments there. Some of them, according to what I saw in the Press, are going for Kshs8 million or Kshs11 million. The cost of building those houses, if the land was not that costly, would not be anything more than Kshs2 million. Why are we killing our own people? They could put that money in housing and the rest of the money in other investments. We need to sit down as a Kenyan people and agree on how we are going to proceed so that these things can open up. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, there was a study on how to do railway transport in Nairobi. We do not even need a study. We just need an efficient railway system, for example, from Kibera to the City of Nairobi the way it is now. But to have eight coaches in the morning and in the evening does not solve the problem of eight matatus . So, what are we trying to do? It becomes too costly to run that railway system. I think it is a joke. However, if there was a train passing by after every five minutes, like it happens in other countries, we would be utilising that railway, as old as it is. Where is the rolling stop? We do not have that. So, we must think holistically and see how we can improve. I beg to support."
}