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{
    "id": 205900,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/205900/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 178,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Mr. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I was making reference to the intended Lamu Port. I would want to see a situation where if we have an investor we agree that he will put 60 per cent of the equity and then offload the rest of it on the NSE for anybody to be able to buy shares and participate in such lucrative business. This will apply to Mombasa and Lamu ports. In the last ten years, we have been speaking about privatising Mombasa and Lamu ports and other ports in the country. As we speak, Tanzania is planning to privatise Dar es Saalam to give us competition. They are engaged in discussions to build a new modern port in Tanga. That is competition. Mozambique has Beira, Nambula and Maputo. All these are our competitors. We have to move. We have talked for too long about privatising the Port of Mombasa. The Port of Mombasa serves a corridor of up to 300 million people. Just imagine that 30 million people transact business in the Port of Mombasa per annum and each individual spends just US$5,000 in the transactions. How much revenue do we bring to the country? It is time that we urged the Ministry to move and actualise what we have been talking about for the last over ten years. If we do not, we will soon be overtaken. We are competing with neighbours. If Somalia comes to normalcy, they will give us stiff competition because they have got very beautiful deep water harbours. Yet, we stand in a unique position to offer port services to Ethiopia with a population of 73 million people and a landlocked country. We have Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Eastern Congo and Southern Sudan. All these countries are landlocked. We can cut a niche that 3660 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES September 4, 2007 nobody will ever take away from us. I want to urge the Minister to move very quickly on this. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as a formulator of transport policy, one keeps wondering why do we have trailers carrying containers passing through the streets of Nairobi to go to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi? If you go to the United States of America (USA), trucks like those ones, never see the inside of a city. We should not even be talking of the bypasses that"
}