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"speaker_name": "Mr. Bett",
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"content": "Thank you very much, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me an opportunity to also express my views on the Budget. A budget is a tool to be used in the management of resources by any person, including the Government. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, allow me to quote from a document titled: \"Readings on Inequality in Kenya\", distributed by the Society for International Development. It states:- \"Apparently, one cannot totally rule out some political consideration or influence in resource allocations. Given this, it is difficult to disentangle bureaucratic manipulation from political patronage, since the two are closely related. The main casual factors to inequality in Kenya is poverty, scarcity of resources and a weak budgetary system that has characterized past budgeting and planning processes, whereby those responsible for budgeting and planning have had no mechanism to punish line Ministries not adhering to set principles or priorities. It is also the case that there are no provisions for one to force Ministries to select which region to allocate resources more than the others, for this is done according to Ministry's priority and budget considerations\". Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, look at this Budget. It is saying that the revenue is Kshs503 billion while the expenditure is Kshs693 billion. There is a clear deficit of Kshs190 billion. That deficit is intended to be covered using privatisation receipts and loans. In other words, selling assets that we have today, in order to get money to finance a budget. To me, that is bad management of resources because you are selling your capital to finance a recurrent expenditure. That time when there will be no more assets to be sold, what will happen to our budgetary process? We will resort to what we have always said, that we do not want to go for donor funding. June 26, 2007 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2043 Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Budget is also supposed to be blind to political manipulations, yet when you look at this Budget, there is a lot of political manipulation in it. A budget that goes that way will, indeed, deny resources to a section of the country or to a section of people who may not have voted for that Government. This is, indeed, one item that we must fight in this country. Where is the trickle down effect of this 6.1 per cent growth? The trickle down effect is the rise in the cost of various commodities that are used by the poor people of this country. You find that the transport costs have gone up; you find the price of sugar has gone up, the price of kerosene has gone up. It cannot be appreciated at all by the people in the villages that the economy has grown by 6.1 per cent. One needs to ask himself, what does the person in Korogocho think about this 6.1 per cent? What does the person in Ijara think about the 6.1 per cent? How about the person in Othaya? What does he think about 6.1 per cent? How about a person in my own village of Cheborgey? What does he think about 6.1 per cent? The answer is one; that is merely a story in the urban centres, and mainly Nairobi. The trickle down effect is not felt by the people in the field. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other area which I want to stress is funding of Ministries that are providing employment, Ministries that are providing food in this country. You cannot allocate 10 per cent of your Budget to the Ministry of state for Defence when there is no war, or sign of war in this country, yet you deny the Ministry of Agriculture, which contributes 24 per cent of your GDP, funding; it provides 80 per cent of your employment; it employs the youth, and there would be no Mungiki if we funded this particular Ministry. You find that we are allocating only 4 per cent to the Ministry of Agriculture, yet we went to Mozambique and signed the Mozambique Declaration that the Ministry of Agriculture in any country must not be allocated less than 10 per cent. But we are allocating less than 10 per cent, and we still expect our youth to be employed. We are allocating more money to the Office of the President, yet the Mungiki menace is even taking away what we thought we were going to get in this country. We need to be able to have priorities and set our minds on things that work. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we are not also careful on mitigation in the agricultural sector. We are talking of drought, we are talking of floods destroying our crops and all that, yet there is no time we are sitting down, as a country, and asking: How do we, for a long time to come, mitigate issues of drought? How do we, for a long time, mitigate issues of floods? Every year, we have the people of Budalang'i, we have the people Kano Plains suffering from floods, and we have never, as a country, developed a policy on how to mitigate or control such floods, and benefit from such water for irrigation purposes. We only talk when there is a problem of drought and assign money to be misused by Government servants, and all other persons who would want to misuse such money. I would want the Government to be serious on the management of drought and floods. We have in other countries examples and lessons that we can learn from in order to control drought consequences and floods, and benefit from such floods. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I see my time is running out, but I want to say that we need, at every time when we are thinking of these Ministries of Agriculture, the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development, Environment and Natural Resources, Lands and Water and Irrigation--- Those are the Ministries which will contribute to the employment pool and reduce unemployment in this country. They will provide for the welfare of our people. We need to address those as opposed to addressing the Ministry of State for Defence, the Office of the President or any other Ministry that may not need such funding. The Ministry of Health requires to be given more funds. The HIV/AIDS pandemic needs to be addressed right from the source of it to the end."
}