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"id": 196315,
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
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"content": " Thank you very much, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, for giving me an opportunity to support this Report. I would like to begin by congratulating hon. Ethuro and his team for a pretty good Report. It is very detailed. However, even that Committee can be questioned on a number of issues. The first one is on the speed at which we receive these reports. This Report is for the year 2001/2002, and we are being asked to comment about it now. Secondly, there are issues of recommendations that are softer than they should be. I think we can afford to be much more strict and serious with regard to the kind of action that we want to be taken against people who steal public resources. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, it is also surprising that the Committee could not go to the bottom of knowing who are some of the recipients of some of the contracts, vehicles and other things that were procured. I think it required more time. We realise that they met 83 times, but I think the Report is incomplete if we cannot be told minor details about the kind of people who were beneficiaries and recipients. We are also not being told about certain people who made certain recommendations regarding procurement and who should have received certain other things. More important, also, is the point that hon. Bahari made; that these Reports are monotonous. They are making us a laughing stock as Parliament. That is because we talk about them every year. We are told of the extent of the damage. Even names of the people that have ripped this country have been mentioned. They are even in many other reports. But nothing happens. So, what is the point of spending so much taxpayers' money to have 83 meetings and make so many visits across the country, to actually spend as much as some of the corrupt deals we are talking about, if we are not going to act on these reports? What is the need? I think we must find a mechanism for ensuring that action is taken. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the findings in this Report are worrying and actually scandalous. It is a shame that these kinds of things happen in this country. Public land continues to be grabbed. We are grabbing the Agricultural Development Co-operation (ADC) farms, yet we now have the problem of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), who do not have any land on which to settle. The people who grabbed this land least need it. We do nothing about it; we just talk about the problem. We do not appreciate the fact that too much public land is misappropriated. There are people in positions of authority who own land bigger than districts and provinces. People are grabbing land set aside for schools to the extent that in Nairobi we now have very few institutions, except for the private institutions. The land that was set aside for our public institutions by the white man, when he left in 1963 has also been grabbed by the very people who wanted to replace the white man, so that they could do better for the Africans. People are grabbing cemeteries and public parks. Public parks were set aside because a lot of the people in this country are poor. They cannot afford the big residential homes we have in Runda, Langata and so on. They need a place where they can have some breathing space. But we want to grab that land. We also have cases of people grabbing public roads, bridges and other facilities that are meant for use by the public. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, we have been told a lot about the issue of irregular procurement and payments. We have also heard about cases of the type and quality of goods that were procured. It is only in Government Ministries where you find models of Pajeros that are three or four years old when there are newer brands in the market. This is because cheaper quality was procured. These vehicles are all over the place. It is only in Government where one can question the work done on roads, water, health services and so on, especially by the people who provide those services. There are also cases of excess expenditure and imprest that is never accounted for. There is also the issue of transparency with regard to the allocation of donor funding. Sometimes there is April 22, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 569 duplication of money that has already been provided by Treasury. This can be used to hide a loan, because we do know that if resources have already been voted and other resources come in, then there is no adequate explanation as to how the total resources are expended. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the recommendations are great in terms of what action should be taken. But, again, we lament, because even though these recommendations are made all the time, we seem to be seeing no action. However, there is hope. I wonder if we can achieve this given the kind of political conglomeration that we find ourselves in. When the NARC Government came to power in 2002 it promised Kenyans zero-tolerance to corruption. We were promising zero- tolerance to corruption because we believed the regime we had been fighting had all the tolerance to corruption. That was KANU. But as you know, KANU has bounced back in a big way. The very regime that we were fighting due to corruption, and that made us promise to have zero tolerance to corruption, has bounced back! The question is, how much corruption can we fight with this kind of people? Therefore, the nature of our coalition begs a lot of questions. Are we going to be making political compromises that will make it impossible for us to implement the reforms that we believe in? Is this the best way to deal with the problems of this country if we really want to change things? Are some of these political coalitions necessary if we know they will be an impediment? Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the same applies to the Civil Service. We are not just talking about politicians. In the last Parliament, we kept lamenting that one of the reasons we could not implement change was because of the civil servants whom we had retained. We are retaining some of them even when they should be retiring, yet we expect to implement change!"
}