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"id": 210074,
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"speaker_name": "Prof. Maathai",
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"legal_name": "Wangari Muta Maathai",
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"content": "Thank you very much, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me this opportunity to contribute to this Motion. First of all, I want to congratulate the Minister, and his team, for the excellent work they are doing in trying to provide electricity to the rural areas. Particularly, I want to thank the Minister for prioritising schools or institutions and shopping centres. It is a shame that our people are still poor such that, even when such power is provided, they still find it difficult to pay the Kshs35,000 deposit or so. It is such a wonderful thing to see electricity being supplied to all those shopping centres. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to say something that is, probably, way ahead of us but, in many ways, it is okay for us to think way ahead. I think it is such an unfortunate thing that the Minister has to try to reach individual farmers, especially in the rural areas. When you think about all the resources that are used to move from one farmer to another--- In fact, if we were to put our people into villages or clusters, it would be much cheaper to provide not only electricity, but water and other services. But, unfortunately, because our people are scattered all over and we do not bother to bring them to shopping centres, we continue to use a lot of resources to reach them. I was wondering, for example, in my own constituency, the amount of resources that are used to purchase pipes to move from one farmer to another. Just imagine how much more we would have accomplished with the same resources, if we were dealing with villages. In Europe and other developed countries, they are luckier because they realized this much earlier. They encouraged their people to go into villages where they were provided with resources much more cheaply. I know that, one day, we will reach there. But it is a shame that we have to wait. We have to, first of all, spend so much of our resources spreading it out to scattered farmers. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to dwell on an issue that I have raised many times in this House. I think it is very, very important. I have even mentioned it to the Minister. That is in connection to the use of trees to process tea in the tea-growing areas. I think the Ministry should actually be pro-active about that by providing, if necessary, subsidised electricity to tea factories. Tea factories encourage farmers to plant exotic eucalyptus trees, so that they could use them to cure tea. They do so because they consider trees to be less expensive than electricity. They say so quite clearly. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I wish the Ministry could support those industries, so that they do not encourage farmers to plant exotic eucalyptus trees. That is because farmers plant those trees along river beds and at sources of rivers. Some of those industries are even planning to go to the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to be given land to plant their own plantations. They make so much noise when they encourage farmers to plant those trees on farmers' land. When trees are planted on farmers' land or sections of the forest, the damage to the environment is the same. Those trees are taking too much water from the ground and, eventually, they are going to affect the water levels and volumes in our rivers. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, since much of our electricity is coming from water, August 8, 2007 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3075 we need those rivers to continue flowing. The greater the volume the better, so that our dams could fill up and generate more electricity. So, I want to appeal to the Ministry to make the linkage between our capacity to continue producing the best tea in the world, and our capacity to continue providing ourselves with electricity. If we do so and make that linkage, we will be willing to support the tea industry, so that we can provide them with micro-hydropower projects to generate their own electricity in the little rivers they have nearby. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I know that the Ministry is probably thinking about it, but I think we need to, much more faster, invest in wind and solar energy in much bigger ways than we are doing. Even though we can invest in bio-fuels, I know that we do not have the money to invest in nuclear energy. So, the best options are wind and hydro, which we are already using, and, definitely, solar. The technology is there. We should be able to exploit this technology, so that it can add to our national grid. If we do so and improve the production of hydro-power, we should be less dependent on fossil fuels, especially petroleum fuel. Due to global warming, and the whole issue of climate change, more and more pressure is going to be put on countries. At the moment, it is very voluntary, but I am sure that as the consciousness rises in the world, and people realise that we are doing so much damage to our environment by using fossil fuels, we may get to a point where there will be demand that we cut down on the amount of petroleum and other fossil fuels that we use in our industries. So, it is very important for us to be more prepared for such an eventuality than to wait and have to be forced to be less dependent on oil. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I do not know how much we have done, especially in the area of transport, but you only need to trail some of the cars on roads in Nairobi, or along the highways to see that we have, really, not reached a stage where we are concerned about the emissions from our cars. Some of them can literally bury you if you drive behind them, because of the emissions. So, you know that petroleum is being very inefficiently burnt in those engines. The fact that, that is happening and our police are not paying any attention to those cars, shows that we are polluting the environment at a very high rate in our part of the world, and we need to do something about it. I know, that is partly because we buy a lot of second-hand cars from Dubai, or wherever. Many of them are discarded because they are no longer acceptable in their own countries, because of their inefficient engines. So, we need to look into this issue. I know that it is not directly related to this Ministry, but I think this Ministry needs to work very closely with the Ministry of Transport in order to ensure that we do not pollute our environment at the rate we are doing. Global warming is a big issue in the world and we, really, ought to prioritise it both in this Ministry and other relevant Ministries, and do whatever we can to reduce the amount of emissions that we are putting into the atmosphere. I would also like to recommend that one thing that Kenyans can do is to plant more trees. As we know, trees are one way through which the environment is able to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that we have in the atmosphere. Although, as a country and even as a region, we are not, comparatively, producing as much greenhouse gases as many other countries in the world, we nevertheless can play a part in trying to provide a solution. One way of doing this is to protect our forests. We should plant trees and protect our standing trees. In that connection, I want to appeal the Ministry for Environment and Natural Resources to link up with this Ministry and commit itself to protecting our forests. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I was scared the other day when I heard some people in the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources talk about re-introducing the shamba system in our forests. Even ordinary people now, especially around Mount Kenya and the Aberdares Forest, where we have put a lot of emphasis not to have the shamba system, are already seeing greater volumes of water in the rivers as they flow out of the forests. Cleaner water is coming out 3076 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES August 8, 2007 of those forests and, therefore, less silt is getting into our hydro-electric dams. For the first time, people are even seeing fish! With those words, I beg to support."
}