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"speaker_name": "Dr. Kosgei",
"speaker_title": "The Member for Aldai",
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"legal_name": "Lucas Kipkosgei Chepkitony",
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"content": " Thank you very much, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to, first of all, thank the people of Aldai for entrusting me with their affairs for the next five years. I would like to take the opportunity to also congratulate all those who were elected in that rather gruelling election that we all went through. I wish to also congratulate those who were nominated to this august House, because they have their own duty to play. I suppose hon. Members will understand if I pay special tribute to lady Members of Parliament, who are my colleagues here. We thank the people of Kenya for trusting us and giving us this opportunity to show what we can do. We will certainly work collectively and individually to confirm to the electorate of Kenya at large that we will do what others do even better to ensure that next time round, we double the number of the lady Members of Parliament that we have in this House. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, in his Speech, the President made reference to free secondary education that has just been introduced. I listened to my brother, the Minister for Education telling us that this has now been spread to areas which were being left out. I want to say for the record that, in fact, marginal areas and areas with difficult terrain, like my Nyando Escarpment, or what used to be called the Nandi Escarpment, could not possibly raise 45 children per classroom. However, they cannot move to schools so far away because the terrain is harsh. The people there are poor. They have no resources. I would like to urge the Ministry of Education to look further than just Boards of Governors (BoGs). Between the BoGs and the Ministry of Education, some children in those areas will not go to school. In his Speech, the President made reference to the agricultural sector. In our negotiations, and in the mediation talks that just ended, we were painfully aware, as all Kenyans must be, that the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) farmed in the areas they were displaced from. It is important for us, given that this is our planting season, to encourage IDPs, help to re-settle them peacefully. Furthermore, the Government should assist them by giving them seeds and fertilizers. It should also assist those other people living in those areas because they also suffered tremendously. We do not want to suffer the problems of hunger and famine later this year. As a matter of fact, if we do not secure our food resources, we will have to provide funds to import food. By so doing, we will take away funds from development - funds we desperately need to develop our rather dilapidated infrastructure. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I was one of the negotiators in the mediation talks that are still ongoing. I want to take this opportunity to thank hon. Members of this House, and Kenyans at large, for their messages of support. When the process was launched just over six weeks ago, it appeared to me as if it was a completely daunting exercise. It was not helped at first by messages of threat we all received, but those messages soon turned into messages of encouragement. We were encouraged by letters sent to us through Short Text Massaging (SMS), by people who simply stood around the mediation area, to say: \"Work hard. We are behind you.\" Although the media has been 166 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES March 13, 2008 roundly condemned for all sorts of things, personally, I want to record my thanks to those who stood in the rain, in the mornings and in the night, at Serena Hotel, and constantly encouraged us individually and collectively to work hard, because Kenyans expected a lot from those mediation talks. One morning we went there; someone had sent us music to encourage us and one of the numbers there was to do with children. It asked everybody to wake up and look after the children. That record is old. It was produced in the 1970s, but it was extremely relevant and encouraged all of us to go on. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we are at a point in this Parliament where we have witnessed the President of the country and the Prime Minister-designate take courage. They reminded me of the verse that starts; \"There is a tide in the affairs of men---\". Those of you who know that verse would know that it was an important time for us that the President and my leader in ODM decided to rise to the tide and have the courage to sign a document that they believed would bring Kenya back to normalcy. If anybody doubted that this was going to happen, we were enlightened, encouraged and pleased by the reception of the Kenyans of the particular document. I was personally encouraged by the courage of those two leaders, because they displayed true leadership. We in this House stand at a position where we could go down in history as people who let down the Kenyans and their leadership, or as the people who seized the moment and took the matter a step further to solve the problems that we have. We will never solve all our problems at once, but we can start somewhere with the documents that will come before us to support our leaders and Kenyans. We could start by working a little harder in our own constituencies, and visiting each other in our constituencies to see that perhaps there is something that we can do. We could start by not rejecting the efforts offered by the Speaker, even though it has not come, to bond. When we went into the meeting for the negotiations, it was not quite clear that the people on the other side would be talking to us. But ultimately, we did manage to bond enough to put something down that later on became the accord. I would like to encourage my colleagues, and tell them that the problem is ours. If we feel, as some people have suggested, that it was not about elections, then we should go to the commissions that have been established, give evidence or get other people to do so, so that we can know where our problem lies. In the past years, we saw small glimpses of what we could have. This one brought in the tsunami. We cannot afford, as a country, to see what we have seen, and see the images that were defining Kenya around the world. With those few remarks, I beg to support the Motion."
}