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"id": 220662,
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"speaker_name": "Mr. Boit",
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"legal_name": "William Kiplumbei Boit",
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"content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I stand here to strongly support this Bill. I am very pleased, indeed, to announce that I have been associated with the occupational safety and health issues half of my life when I was teaching in the Kenya Medical Training College (KMTC). Therefore, I am very much biased and in love with this Occupational Safety and Health Bill. I am also very much interested in it. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the House should be happy to note that the purpose and essence of this Bill is to actually update the old one which has been in existence, particularly with regard to compensation of workers who have been injured in the factories. The old regulations and standards did not really cater for that, but this Bill has catered for that. There are so many things that happen in the factories and people have been suffering for too long. I think that this country--- I want to congratulate the Minister and his very strong and educated staff for having brought this Bill at this time. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, with regard to some of the Acts that we are trying to repeal, honestly speaking, if you visit some of our factories and see how workers suffer, you will actually wonder how we have, all this time, allowed this Bill to take too long to be prepared. I think we should have prepared this Bill a long time ago. We are talking about the occupational safety and health of human beings. These things surround the health of the workers. The Bill talks about the environment of every factory. If you take Nairobi alone, I think it has over 100,000 factories. How many people are working in those factories? It is nearly a quarter of all the people working in Nairobi! If you go to other parts of this country where factories abound, there are so many workers and the factories occupy so many people and, therefore, it is our concern. In fact, that is why this Bill talks of a Council. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the previous speaker talked about there being so many people in the Government. Honestly speaking, where else can we get experts apart from the Government? The Government has spent a lot of money training officers and so on. If you go to the Ministry of Health--- Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, if you look at Clause 28, really, I could not have gone anywhere. All the experts are in the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development, Ministry of Trade and Industry and all other Ministries and Government Departments such as the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) and the Central Bureau of Statistics. That is a very fertile ground from which we can get experts for this Council. I would like to congratulate the Minister for having included all those people. If we have to add other people, I do not really mind, but I think too many cooks will spoil the soup. Mr. Deputy Speaker Sir, the Occupational Safety and Health Bill talks about caring for people in the factories who may suffer from diseases or as a result of poor conditions in the factories. There are some conditions in factories that make workers develop diseases. It is sometimes even difficult for doctors or anybody to tell that so-and-so is suffering from a chest problem and so on. Sometimes they do not even talk about it. Later on, when the worker has retired, that is when he or she becomes sick and it becomes difficult to compensate the worker. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this is the kind of law that we would like to pass in this House so that we can capture what we can do about people who are not discovered to be sick when they are working. Without this kind of law, it will be very difficult to identify them. However, now, if somebody's hand got cut or if one contracted tuberculosis or a problem to do with his breathing system or hearing--- That is why we call it occupational. This Bill is meant to take care of the ears of workers. For example, there must be optimum sound in the factories, or with regard to 1508 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES May 22, 2007 protecting the workers' eyes, they must put on goggles. For instance, when we visited a fish factory in Mombasa, we found workers working in the cold rooms. It was very cold and if you looked at their hands and feet, some of them had developed some scales. Those guys did not bother! They are so used to it that they did not realise that they had actually lost their skin sensitivity. They had all the rights to take that factory to court. I wish to challenge the inspectors and the management of that factory--- Why have they allowed such things to happen? Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we need to have inspectors visiting these factories regularly so that they can discover the occupational problems that occur to workers. You have heard and it is, in fact, mentioned in this Bill, the overcrowding and size of working places. The Bill also talks about the optimum temperatures in a factory, that is, whether they are too cold or too hot. All these things are taken care of in this Bill and ours is only to approve. We have gone through this Bill very carefully. I am privileged to have got this information because I am a Member of the Departmental Committee on Health, Housing, Labour and Social Welfare. We have gone through this Bill; we have also been educated on it. Mine is just to wish that all the hon. Members in this House be educated and made aware about the precautions mentioned in this Bill. We really require that information. I wish the whole House would go into a conference that would address these issues in depth. This is because it is very interesting and it involves a lot of things. The health education required for the understanding of this Bill is very interesting. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, somebody talked about penalties. I know that the penalties given in this Bill are friendly. We are trying to encourage people to do their businesses comfortably. We are not going to set penalties that will scare them from their businesses. We have health educators and officers from the Ministry who should be giving lectures and educating the management and workers. They should educate them on the necessary precautions that they need to take so that they do not get sicknesses or face hazards that they could easily encounter in the course of their working time. I think that it is the Ministries concerned--- I was a Public Health Officer and I visited many factories during my time in the Ministry. I gave free health education to factory workers. We have here in Nairobi, for example, the Ministry of Local Government and they have public health officers. They have all the necessary information that they can give to factories even before they are licensed. These factories must meet some standards which are mentioned here. Therefore, if somebody has constructed a building without following the law, that is carelessness on the part of the Government. However, the provisions are given so that if somebody wants to open a factory of any kind, then he must follow the laid down regulations. Before the factories are licensed, they should have met those requirements. So, one wonders how a building, like the one we visited in the Industrial Area recently, was licensed where some unscrupulous businessman locked up people in the factory and when fire broke out, people could not escape. They all perished because of the fire. That was carelessness. How do you lock people inside the factory throughout the night? This guy goes to sleep in his house and locks up people in the factory! They cannot escape in case fire breaks out or there is an accident! I believe this is carelessness on the part of those concerned officers from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Local Government or even the factory inspectors who should have discovered the problem beforehand. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I think we need to support this Bill very strongly, indeed. With those few remarks, as I said, I am privileged to have a lot of information on this Bill because I have discussed these matters in the Departmental Committee on Health, Housing, Labour and Social Welfare, I beg to strongly support this Bill."
}