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"id": 196786,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/196786/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Mureithi",
"speaker_title": "The Member for Ol Kalou",
"speaker": {
"id": 89,
"legal_name": "Erastus Kihara Mureithi",
"slug": "erastus-mureithi"
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"content": " Thank you, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker. My name is Mr. Erastus Mureithi. I come from Ol Kalou Constituency. I take this opportunity to thank Ol Kalou people for having accorded me this opportunity to serve them as their hon. Member. This is also my maiden speech. I tried to catch the eye of the Speaker and I am very happy that I caught your eye. I would like to support the Motion by bringing up a few issues regarding the Accountants Bill. Having had the opportunity to go through it very much, I have one or two things to speak about regarding it. For a long time, this country has had a shortage of qualified accountants and, therefore, what we have found out is that most of the firms have had accounts assistants dealing with very important parts of their books and, therefore, facing a lot of problems as far as taxation is concerned. That is one of the issues that this Bill is going to correct. That is because if there is 462 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES April 15, 2008 anything that most companies agonize about is taxation. That is why you find that our indigenous investors have a problem compared to the foreign investors who tend to have many books as my previous colleague has said. They make many books of accounts and, hence, they have a relative advantage over taxation. The other issue I would like to raise is that when you have a body regulated by law, it is also necessary to ask it to develop a code of ethics outside the normal statute so that it can self-regulate and see that people are following the law with respect to the accounting procedures and keeping of books of accounts. However, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would like to say that when I look at this country, something tends to get me very concerned. We are agricultural based, but we seem to give so much emphasis to industrialisation and, therefore, we forget that this country will take off when we pump a lot of money into the rural areas and develop agriculture, whether through small scale or large scale. Considering that our country is becoming small scale, we should do like India. India does not have large scale farms and when Indira Gandhi came up with her philosophy of the green movement, it is now a net exporter. So, what we have to do is to re-look at the way we are going to re-engineer our agriculture. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, when His Excellency the President read his Speech in this House, what shocked me is that one of the items that was left out was horticulture. We only dealt with tourism, tea and coffee. May I tell this House that this country has survived twice because of horticulture. This country survived in the Likoni Ferry accident when all the tourists left and 30,000 employees in the tourist industry were completely unemployed. By then, I served as the Chairman of the Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS), an organisation that was receiving Kshs280 million through gate collections. We went down to Kshs40 million which could not even pay the services of the KWS. What sustained this country was horticulture! After the clashes started on 30th December, 2007, all other institutions, tea, coffee and tourism, disappeared. What is sustaining this country and the strength of the Kenya Shilling today is horticulture. When the Speech was read, only those three sectors were mentioned and horticulture was totally left out and yet, it is a very important area. My presentation is that we look at horticulture, not necessarily from a large scale farmers' point, but from a small scale point of view. In the 1970s, before the large farms investors came here, Kenya was being sustained by small scale growers in Kinangop. However, they have been pushed out because of the aggression of large scale growers. We must go back and see where we went wrong. We must also distribute horticulture because Uganda grows flowers around the Lake. But we have no flowers in the lake region in Nyanza. That area is better for flower growing because it is drier than the Ugandan side, which is completely humid and growing of flowers is quite difficult. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would now like to address myself to the issue of investment in this nation. It is always good not to re-invent the wheel, but to look at the countries that have succeeded in development and growth. I would like us to look at a country like South Africa. I would prefer that the Minister for Finance - and I will be addressing him because when we try to re-invent the wheel, we do not go very far. I toured South Africa when I was the Managing Director of Co-operative Bank and one of the things that I found out had sparked and stimulated development in that country is tax regime. I visited Blomfontein and I found that they have tax regimes that give compensation to the people who invest further from the market. As a result, they encourage people to go and invest far and wide. What has happened in this nation is that the tax regime tends to encourage the large cities. They are growing at the expense of the small scale areas in the rural areas. The other thing I would like to look at is the youth and appropriate technology. If this April 15, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 463 nation does not address itself to the youth, we have a bombshell. All over this country, we look at the issue of the youth. The rural kenya is very poor and the urban poor are very poor. Believe you me, if we do not address ourselves to the two groups, without necessarily looking at any region but rural Kenya, we are doomed! Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, rural Kenya is poor. If we are not careful, these groups will revolt. This is a bombshell and we will find it difficult to deal with it once it explodes. That now brings me to the policy of this nation from the time of colonialism. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I had the opportunity to work in Kisumu where I was dealing with cotton. In the 1970s, cotton could only be exported either to Manchester in the United Kingdom (UK) or some other foreign place. There were no industries that were manufacturing cotton in this country. Look at the issue of financial institutions. What is the policy of financial institutions in this nation? It was generated that all the banks whatever branch you are talking about, and I am talking out of experience, in terms of banking policy, are just collecting units. The money comes to Nairobi. The people who borrow it are people with big business. They have denied the rural people an opportunity to get money. One of these fine days, I will bring a Motion before this House to reverse that investment portfolio. I would like to see money circulating in the rural areas. We want our people to borrow their own money. Right now, all banks are collecting units. They make a huge profit to the tune of Kshs60 billion. What is ploughed back to the rural areas is almost zero. The financial policy, therefore, must be re-looked into. We need to review it because it was formulated by the colonialists. We have banks that are district-based or constituency-based. Those banks are run down like the Savings and Co-operative Credit Societies (SACCOS). That is why I was very happy with His Excellency the President's Speech. He said the time has come for us to debate issues relating to SACCOS in this country. We would like to see SACCOS based in constituencies. We would like to see them collecting their own money as it is happening in a country like Indonesia. I visited that country when I was starting the micro-finance unit in the Co- operative Bank. We went there with the current Managing Director of the Kenya Tourist Board (KTB). We found that these financial institutions are created at the district level. As a result, I thought that wealth will be created to improve the rural Kenya. Look at the Initial Public Offer (IPO) that was given by Safaricom. We have 4,000 co-operative societies in this country with seven million people. When allocation was being done for foreign investment companies, nothing was given to our co-operatives. We denied the wanjikus of this country an opportunity to invest in an institution that they have created with their own money. The bamba Kshs50 air time card has created a monster. However, when it came to allocation of IPOs, we allocated shares to foreign based companies. We denied our SACCOS the opportunity to invest in their own nation. It will be a major disaster when we start transferring the wealth of this nation from the hands of the wanjikus to the hands of foreigners. It is a very tragic moment when we do not recognise the co-operative societies. This country is known for destroying the institutions they have taken many years to build. Right now, Co-operative Bank will issue IPOs. Are we also going to surrender that wealth to foreign hands? Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, it actually bleeds my heart to see us depriving our SACCOS of the biggest investments in this country. When we come to share allocation, we do so to foreigners. It is high time Kenyans came together and re-engineered ourselves, so that we remove the disparity of this nation. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the chaos we witnessed in the recent past was because 464 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES April 15, 2008 of election dispute. A time is coming when the uprising will not be between tribes, but \"haves and have nots.\" It is good that we start looking at the machinery of this nation. One of the machineries that can remove disparity among our people is the co-operative societies of this nation. That is a delivery vehicle. They did in the Scandinavian countries and developed them into modern nations. If you study the history of Germany, France and Poland, the biggest bank which is Triple \"A\" is located in Holland. It is called Rabo Bank. Rabo means co-operative bank. I think what we should do in this country is to make sure that we re-engineer ourselves financially rather than by creating mayhem. We should re-engineer ourselves on how we will transfer resources to the rural Kenya and to the urban poor. Once we do so, we forestall a situation whereby we shall not have a major problem. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I do believe the Accountants Bill is a great Bill if it will be fully implemented. This nation is known for so many laws and yet, they are never implemented. So, we cannot keep on making laws and yet, we do not implement them. With those remarks, I beg to support."
}