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"speaker_name": "Mr. Syongo",
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"content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, during the Budget Speech and immediately thereafter, the impression I had is that this is a well thought-through Budget. I still think that it was a well thought-through Budget, but with an eye on the desired outcome of the forthcoming general elections. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, nevertheless, Kenyans have a life beyond the general elections. I would have expected the Minister to consider other things that would have very fundamental impacts on the lives of Kenyans, especially now that the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) has been replaced by another fundamental paper called Vision 2030. If you look at the Vision 2030, as Mr. Wamwere has rightly said, it represents a very fundamental paradigm shift. The shift is so fundamental that there is need for full participation of Kenyans in the various sectors. Worse still, even Parliament, which represents the people of this country, was never involved in the preparation of this document. No consultations were done, whatsoever! Recently, we were told that the paper will be presented to us, after the event! Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the fundamentals laid out in the Vision 2030 document will direct the funding and Government policy for the next 23 years and yet, Parliament was not involved or consulted. You will recall that the Minister specifically said that Vision 2030 will be driven by selected key sectors which will attract special funding and attention. What was the criteria for selecting those sectors? In any case, are those sectors regionally distributed to the extent that all corners of this country will be ignited to experience economic recovery and growth? I know that my colleague is saying that I have an office in that Ministry and that I should have been there to help. But that is not the point. The point is: Parliament should have been consulted and should have been part and parcel of the development of that paper. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I laud the Minister for providing adequate funds to distribute electricity to various parts of this country. For the very first time, a constituency like Gwassi will see electric poles, wires and, hopefully, power. But there was no matching budget for electricity generation. Only two weeks ago, we were told that, currently, the gap between demand and supply leaves a margin of only 10 mega watts. That is why we are experiencing the outages. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, unless there is funding for generation commensurate with funding for electricity distribution, what we are going to spend on distribution and poles will not be productive, and as a result, we are going to experience outages that we have never experienced in this country before. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other issue is on equity. If you look at the fine prints, and they say that the devil is in the details--- If you look at the Ministry of Roads and Public Works, for example, I do not know how much was allocated for roads in the district that the Chair comes from. But in Suba District, we were given Kshs12 million. But some other districts, which are smaller than Suba District, were given Kshs500 million. A district like Kuria was given Kshs500,000. That is merely half a million! Others have been given Kshs1 billion in terms of allocation on roads. Where is the equity? How are we going to bring those parts of the country into economic productivity, so that we can talk of a country that is fair and an economy that supports every part of this country and every Kenyan, irrespective of which region one comes from? Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, on the issue of education, the Minister talked about free tuition in secondary schools. It is fantastic to talk about free tuition in secondary schools. But should we not fix the problem with the free primary education first? At present, the pupil/teacher ratio is crazy. We have too few teachers attending to very many pupils in primary schools to the extent that, we will feed very poor material into secondary education. Ultimately, we will not have mature and competent human resource to actually help 1886 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES June 19, 2007 achieve the Vision 2030 strategic objectives."
}