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{
"id": 240987,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/240987/?format=api",
"text_counter": 181,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Kituyi",
"speaker_title": "The Minister for Trade and Industry",
"speaker": {
"id": 293,
"legal_name": "Mukhisa Kituyi",
"slug": "mukhisa-kituyi"
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"content": " Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I will answer some of the issues. 2406 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES July 26, 2006 While I have received very generous statements of solidarity and approval from hon. Members, I think it is only fair that I bring out to the attention of the House that much of the good work we are doing at the Ministry is team work. I may be the public face of the Ministry, but there are many competent officers who are unsung heroes. I may be the public face of Uchumi turn- around, but there are many officers who spent sleepless nights working on the issue. So, I wish to share that appreciation with the officers in the Ministry, negotiating officers, technical officers, managers and administrators who made it possible, with the most miserly of a budget, to get many things done. An issue has been raised that there are some areas I have not shown their importance. In my understanding, when I present my Vote in the Committee of Supply, I come to justify why I should be given the money allotted to me. If I had sought money elsewhere, for things I think are very important and was not given, I would not come to Parliament and say why those things are important. If I have seen the critical importance of research and development for industrialisation, and I am given Kshs5 million for KIRDI to do research, I cannot come and wax eloquence about the importance of research. So, there are some areas, precisely because of under-funding, I have brought in a large case for them because I am not asking you to give me anything for them. So, I hope that the other agencies of the Government, the other Ministers; for instance, the Ministry of Finance and others, will see the mood of the House. There is a lot of important work to be done and we cannot do it when we come here and purport to be having a ministerial budget of 30 million dollars. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, through the efforts of my officers and myself, we got a grant of 22 million Dollars from the World Bank to start work on micro, small and medium scale enterprises. That budget is equivalent to the total recurrent budget of my Ministry for this year. In my language, we have a saying that: \"He who feeds you can beat your wife in your presence.\" I would not stand here, proudly, saying that I am a Minister for Trade and Industry for Kenya and will plan what to do, yet I have to get most of the money for doing promotional work from donors who want to wail more than the bereaved. At the end of the day, it is a clear statement that the sky is the limit for what we are capable of doing. However, the limit of resources at our disposal restricts us, even from the dreams of what areas we can go into. I will just name some two areas without going into details because they are not substantially dependent on money allocated here. One is KNTC. When I became Minister, a Cabinet decision had been made, that KNTC would be disbanded. The Government had no business with retail business and trade. I am happy that in the period I have been the Minister, I have been able to share the issue with the President of this country, and my Ministry is preparing a Cabinet memorandum, which is the first step towards an amendment to change the KNTC Act. This is our thinking: If we believe in affirmative action, it does not mean that we believe in affirmative action in domestic retail trade only. As circumstances grow, we have to look at how we can grow the Kenyan African entrepreneur. I have been doing a lot of promotional work for the outward trade into the Great Lakes Region and into Southern Sudan. However, you will find that the average Kenyan manufacturer in Gikomba, making 10 wheelbarrows per day, does not have the logistical capacity and security resources to start exporting the wheelbarrows to Southern Sudan, yet there is some phenomenal market for his product in the region. What are we thinking of doing, now that the mandate to start establishing Kenyan African into domestic retail trade has been outlived by KNTC? But its capacity to be a warehouse and to be a lead agent for promoting Kenya to be a lead enterprise cannot run out of justification. Therefore, I will bring an amendment to the KNTC Act, to seek to transform KNTC into a Government trading house, which will be warehousing Kenyan small producers of manufactured goods and their products into the Great Lakes Region and into Southern July 26, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2407 Sudan and in the other regional markets for Kenyan value added products. This, to me, is one of the concrete ways that you can move from the rhetoric of value adding to exactly creating an incentive for value adding. The argument that you have to look at value addition in the domestic market is something which Prof. Anyang'-Nyong'o and I knew when we were communists. I have outgrown it. You cannot, today, structure a 20-year industrialisation programme on the basis of a population of 30 million people, with 500 dollars per capita, GDP. We have to build on the strength of where we are so far. We have started creating the infrastructure of outward bound trade that will account for 43 per cent of the export trade within the 22 COMESA countries; that we are the largest exporters of value added products in the COMESA; that we are continuing to bring down tariff and non-tariff barriers between this country and neighbours; that we are creating conditions for liberalising the right of establishment, liberalisation and trade of services, which creates conditions for us to domesticate that market. If we can keep consistence in our vision, politics and our enterprises, I see nothing wrong to budget that we want to make more jikos than we can possibly use in this country because we have neighbouring countries which are still harvesting peace, like DRC, where technologies which go beyond that of making a jiko is at least 20 years away. That makes sense to me. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, similarly, while we may celebrate the Numeric Machining Company - by international standards, it has fallen back quite a bit - the technology of late the 1980s and early 1990s does not remain cutting edge technology for too long. But the reality is that the true institutional programme we have gone through: The first challenge we faced was this: Although the money for starting NMC came from the Government, when NMC was formed, because the Government wanted to hide from donors by saying it was spending money on building a Nyayo car, the Government hid the car at the Railway Workshop and then nominally created an equity between Kenya Railways and the University of Nairobi. So, for me as a Minister, getting this from the Minister for Transport took me the first year. The second step was that we had to get the board of NMC, which was exclusively made up of a board of representatives of the University of Nairobi and Kenya Railways, to voluntarily hand over their baby to the Ministry. The next phase is two-fold. You have a vision and want a nucleus of capital goods manufactured. But you are in a situation where the Government cannot put money to manufacture all of them. If the Government cannot raise more than Kshs5 million for Kenya Industrial Research Development Institute (KIRDI) to do research, and also cannot raise money to do serious capital goods manufacture, you look at public resources availability and possibilities of a strategic partner, with whom you can walk through the door. I am glad that we, as the Government, are rapidly going to remove our facilities at the Numerical Machining Complex (NMC) out of the facilities of Kenya Railways, which is now getting private. We will move our facilities to our own land, the 800 acres off Mombasa Road. We shall also continue to look at concrete proposals that have been received from potential partners, who are walking down the road with us on this matter. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I wish to go back to some of the concrete things that hon. Members have proposed. I want to thank you for showing your solidarity on Uchumi Supermarkets. I want to tell doubting thomases that whatever voodoo economics they are following will not see Uchumi Supermarkets go down! About 50 per cent of the solution to problems affecting Uchumi Supermarkets is the patriotism of Kenyans who are going to say: \"We want to shop at Uchumi Supermarkets!\" The experience that we have had over the past one week, even the first two days alone--- The five hypers sold more than what the 17 Uchumi shops were selling for two days in December last year. That return of the clientele is critical for the turn-around of Uchumi Supermarkets. Secondly, we have not given money back, like my friend from Kasipul-Kabondo Constituency alleged. He said that some thieves were there, they stole money and have now given 2408 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES July 26, 2006 it back. It is not operating that way. We had a dilemma! The dilemma was this: In the United States of America (USA), they have Chapter 11 on bankruptcy, where a bankrupt company can go to court to stop its creditors from raiding it. It, therefore, trades under protection, without being put under receivership. In Kenya, the Companies Act (1948) is a very archaic piece of legislation. It does not provide for protective bankruptcy. Therefore, what we have attempted to graft is, in effect, a protective bankruptcy without a statutory provision for it. But, for that, I want to thank the creditors, suppliers, landlords, workers and all the stakeholders who have shown solidarity. I want to assure them that we have separated clearly between what it would take to turn around Uchumi Supermarkets to start a trading enterprise, and walk down the road towards its equity being traded again in the Nairobi Stock Exchange. We have separated that from a forensic exercise of finding out who is to blame for what. Those who are interested and excited about who was responsible for what, can go on. We will try to assist them with as much as they want to know. I would like justice to be done. But, more importantly, there is no greater justice than the social justice for the survival of the great icon of Kenyan enterprise, called Uchumi Supermarkets. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, Prof. Anyang'-Nyong'o asked me what is the value of an industrial master plan, when we are going towards an election. First of all, I want to tell him that he must know the answer because he participated, together with me, in the initial phase of preparing this industrial master plan. Secondly, I would like to inform him that Kenya does not run on an electoral calenda. Kenya needs a vision of a future that is not dictated by the short-term exigencies of political terms in Parliament."
}