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"id": 234604,
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"speaker_name": "Mr. Weya",
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"legal_name": "Sammy Arthur Weya",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Assistant Minister is arguing his point. He is making his point clear. We have been told that five million people die every year in the world from smoking- related diseases. We need to find out how many of these people are from Africa. Diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS are the key killers of our people in Africa. When it comes to advertisement, you either allow somebody to do business or you stop him from doing it. In the a First World country, you cannot advertise cigarettes on television unless it is after 10 o'clock at night. In a liberalised economy, you cannot curtail businessmen. You can either tell them to pack and go, or you allow them to advertise their goods during a certain time frame. November 15, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3725 We should allow people to advertise cigarettes or alcohol within a certain time frame. We should also allow people to advertise cigarettes in bars because people go to bars to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. For example, in Europe, they allow people to advertise cigarettes and alcohol in discotheques. In Europe, there are discos for children up to the age of 21 years, where they do not allow alcohol and cigarettes. There are other discos for people over the age of 21 years and one can smoke and drink there. We should not curtail our society. When somebody wants to drink and smoke, he should go to the drinking and smoking discos, and when somebody does not want to drink and smoke, he should go to where he can drink sodas and dance as well. We should give everybody an opportunity to have his independence as a human being. I support the issue of banning smoking in public places. When you smoke in a public place, you affect the people around you. I had an opportunity to listen to different stakeholders with regard to the issue of banning tobacco smoking. If you go to the streets, you will find a disabled person surviving by selling cigarettes, chewing gum and a few sodas. His stock cannot be worth more than Kshs1,000. If you introduce a requirement that people can only buy cigarettes in packets, you will lock out all these poor people. Then the only people who will afford to sell cigarettes will be the likes of Uchumi and Nakumatt. The poor people will be cut out. Other people will then buy cigarettes from Uchumi and sell them in pieces in dark corners. If you try to curtail the sale of cigarettes in pieces, then people will be selling them in dark corners at a higher cost. When it comes to advertising, I agree that it should be banned within a certain radius from schools. We do not want to encourage our school-going children to smoke. We should also not allow kiosks near schools to be selling cigarettes. We should not allow cigarettes to be sold within a certain radius from every school, so that our children are not affected. I support that kind of a regulation. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I come from an area where growing tobacco has recently been introduced. My people have put up barns at a certain cost. The concerned company has come in and it is financing my people to grow tobacco. If the Government can tell me how it is going to compensate my people who have started growing tobacco, and come up with another crop and finance its growth, then I might consider supporting this Bill. I know for sure that the Government will not have the capacity to do that. It cannot afford to pay for the barns. Each barn is about Kshs50,000. If the Government is willing to tell my people to uproot tobacco and finance an alternative crop for them and commit to do that, then I will be one of the hon. Members who are supporting this Bill. I will not support the Bill unless the Government has put up a concrete plan to compensate the farmer. Our tobacco is being exported to Somalia and Congo and Kenya is earning some foreign exchange and taxable income. A lot of taxes have been levied on tobacco companies because of the Government's concern on health. If the Government wants to levy more taxes on cigarettes, it should levy them in order to compensate some of the things that it wants to phase out. We cannot wake up today and ban cigarettes within a month. We should give the industry some time to phase out, for example, one year, so that they can make use of their packets. They have been manufacturing the packets, advertising agencies have been paid and some people are holding cigarettes in stock. A poor man could be holding cigarettes in stock in the rural area. He might be holding 10 cartons of cigarettes, which he intends to sell after some time. If you put a ban on cigarettes, what will happen to the income that the poor man has paid? He must have paid the manufacturer and he must also have paid taxes. You cannot tell him that this will be illegal in a month. How will he function? You should give the retailer, the wholesaler and the manufacturer time to phase out cigarettes and allow a new production to come into place. We should phase cigarette smoking out slowly. You cannot wake up and decide that you want to put certain regulations in place just because you have been put under pressure by the WHO or some 3726 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES November 15, 2006 other international organisations. I will be bringing some amendments to the Bill. It is true that when we talk about smoking, there is a concern on environment. We should have somebody from the environmental bodies in the Board. We should also have a representative of the advertising agencies. Advertisers and airlines are already regulating themselves. People are not allowed to smoke in aircraft. This clearly shows that the air industry is regulating itself when it comes to smoking. If you visit some multinational offices, for example, banks, you will find that they have banned smoking in their premises. So, you will not be doing anything new because in many Government and private offices in Kenya today, smoking is not allowed. The ban should not interfere with the right choices of individuals. We should ask ourselves why people smoke. We do not know why people have been smoking for many years. We also do not know why people drink alcohol. Those are social issues that we cannot get into as Parliament. People smoke out of choice and it is within their human rights to choose what they want to do. If we try to curtail people's right to choose, we might find ourselves in a very tricky situation. The other issue that I would like to get into is the issue of branding. I do not have a problem with the slogan that cigarette smoking is harmful to one's health, or cigarette kills, but you cannot just say this about all the cigarettes. Each company has its own brand. People choose cigarettes on the basis of branding, as long as their labels show a certain percentage of nicotine which is not very high. We should also stick to using the two national languages; English and Kiswahili, as far as we are concerned. The advertisements on the billboards that are used by the Ministry of Health to pass messages regarding the abuse of drugs are done in different languages. The billboards advertise in those languages because they have been collecting revenue for a long time. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, one of my concerns is that when you have an industry that is operating within the Government, it becomes the responsibility of the Government to look into its operations. I have heard the issue of destruction of forests being discussed here. I think it is the Government's responsibility to curtail the multinationals that are destroying trees. It is the responsibility of the Government to check the operations of a company like BAT, which utilises trees but does not replace them. It is the responsibility of the Government to compel such multinationals to have quotas or a certain number of trees that they have to plant within a given period. The companies should show the Government where they will plant the trees. This is a problem we are having with the multinationals that are dealing with cigarette production, and those which produce paper in this country. They cut down trees and do not replace them. We need to bring a Bill to this House to curtail the way they misuse trees. It is the responsibility of the Government to make sure that the multinationals meet their corporate social responsibility."
}