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{
"id": 196787,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/196787/?format=api",
"text_counter": 205,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Onyonka",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs",
"speaker": {
"id": 128,
"legal_name": "Richard Momoima Onyonka",
"slug": "richard-onyonka"
},
"content": " Thank you, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker. The Minister for Finance who happened to be a year mate of mine at the University of Nairobi is making me laugh. My names are hon. Richard Momoima Onyonka. My constituency is known as Kitutu Chache. I am the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs-designate since I have not yet been sworn in. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the Accountants Bill is a great idea for this country. This country has always needed certain regulations to be put in place, so that we can try and change the way we do business. One of the issues that I wanted to raise in this House is that when you look at the way the accounting profession has been handled and has been handling business, sometimes, it has left a lot to be desired. I hope that the Accountants Bill will be geared towards trying to sort out the problem which exists. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I will make a few observations so that the Chair may understand where I am coming from. One of the issues that I have been shocked to find and discover is that in all the committees which exist at the district level in our country, all of them have district accountants as their members whether it is the District Roads Board (DRB) or District Road Committees (DRCs) or the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF) committees. All the cheques are usually endorsed or signed by the district accountant. So, essentially most of them are party to mismanagement, and the pilfering of public funds has actually been done in front or in sight of the district accountants. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, one of the issues that I wanted to raise is that through this Bill, I hope that we will be able to get to a position whereby if there is a public official who happens to be trained and is qualified to act as an accountant and is found that during his tenure public funds from a certain institution were mismanaged, whether it was the CDF, DRB or the District Water Committee (DWC), then that individual must be punished effectively. So, I hope that the Accountants Bill will be able to actually control and manage our funds transparently wherever the funds will be. So, there needs to be a way of accountability by our officials who happen to be district and even provincial accountants. I hope that this Bill will go a long way in trying to solve that problem. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the second issue that I want to raise is that, basically, accounting has a lot to do with management of money. If you realise one of the issues that all the economists and business people and even churches these days deal with is that we must be able to be good money managers. So, I want in a way to raise this issue, so that at the time when we have an Education Bill being presented into this House, we can have a mandatory class in all our April 15, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 465 secondary schools whereby students are actually taught accounting from Form One up to Form Four, so that all our children of school going age are able to be literate in money matters and managing their money. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the other issue that I want to raise as mentioned by the Member for Ol Kalou Constituency, is that we need to have decentralisation on how we will allocate resources and organise ourselves in this country. I hope the Minister for Finance who is here, will support me that, in fact, the Institute which is being introduced in this Bill, can be decentralised. For example, we can actually have Provincial Institutes, so that we can have many of our students from rural areas going to these colleges which are near their homes. This is because chances are that Nairobi will be too expensive for them to come to school. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the other point that this Bill will introduce is the fact that when you look at every year, you will see that what happens is that all of us are supposed to file taxes. We need to have an accountant to actually help us file these taxes. The problem is that we do not know who is the best qualified accountant who has not been struck off the roll. We do not know whether there is an accountant who has \"eaten\" somebody's money. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I hope that through this Bill, we will get to a position whereby the Government, or the Institute which is already here in this Bill, will be able to advertise every year accounting firms, so that we know them, either at the district level or the provincial level. In so doing, when Kenyans are filing their taxes, they would know which accountant can actually do their books. That would go a long way to make our public use accountants, so that we can file our taxes since we depend on taxes to run our Government. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the other issue is that we seem to have a problem whereby under the management of all the co-operative societies, like the Member for Ol Kalou Constituency, talked about--- For example, in Kisii, all the co-operative societies have failed. Yet, their books have always been audited every year by accountants. All these co-operatives societies have collapsed. There is no coffee industry in Kisii. Now the next thing we will hear collapsing in Kisii is the tea industry. Through this Bill, we need to regulate all the accountants who are practising and doing the books for co-operative societies and Teachers' Savings and Credit Societies (SACCOS). We need to have integrity in the accounting industry. If we do not have integrity in the accounting industry, then our economy will fall sick, the way if we do not have integrity in the medical profession, many patients will die. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I support this Bill and hope that it will go a long way to solve the problems of money management in our country. Thank you, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker."
}