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"id": 245447,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/245447/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Manduku",
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"legal_name": "Hezron Manduku",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to say that from everybody who was calling and reading from the internet, this Budget has been rated to be the best ever since Independence, and we want to support it. I would like to look at some of the factors that are making this Budget to be called one of the best. If we look at the economic revolution that is being done in this country, it is being supported by the new Budget. More money has been allocated to the CDF. This is one of the ways of bringing development to the people in the villages. Although the CDF was introduced three years ago, the common wananchi in the villages have realised that there is a Government which is supporting them. I would, therefore, like to commend the Minister for increasing the allocations for CDF although it was not what we were asking for. We were asking for more money to initiate development projects for our people in the villages. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, primary and secondary schools in the villages are in pathetic conditions. We need to rehabilitate them. The other day, I went round my constituency to see how much work has been done in the schools with the CDF money. If you go there, you will find a lot of difference from what was there a year or two ago. That shows that we are doing a commendable job for this country. In some schools, children were infested by jiggers. Today, there are no jiggers in most of the schools. We should appreciate that we have done a good job for the common mwananchi . Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, on the issue of roads, we have used the CDF money to improve the roads in the villages and our people are able to access the markets and hospitals. There was a time when villagers could not get to hospitals. When they got sick, they were carried in wheelbarrows. You would find people pushing patients from the villages in wheelbarrows while some would carry them on their backs. However, with the little money we receive through the CDF, vehicles can access the villages and take patients to hospital. Let us, therefore, support the CDF. If we continue this way for another ten years, I think Kenya will be a developed country. Rather than being called a Third World country, we may be called a First World country. We would like to ask the Minister to allocate more money for the CDF in next year's Budget. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to look at the issue of health for our people. Public health needs a lot of support. If our people are not healthy, they cannot develop this country. We want our people to develop this country by themselves. If they are not healthy, they June 28, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 1651 cannot do so. Our hospitals are still in very pathetic conditions. They need to be supported. Most importantly, we need more staff. We have no doctors, nurses and support staff. If you go to the dispensaries, you will find one that is supposed to be run by a clinical officer (CO) is being run by an enrolled community nurse (ECN). That ECN is not even able to give a diagnosis. However, as long as there is a medical issue, you will find that she is struggling through a problem that she cannot manage. I would, therefore, like to urge that more money should be allocated to the Ministry of Health to assist them to employ more staff. This will make our people healthy in all spheres. The training of doctors should be encouraged because our country is producing very few doctors. The ratio is one doctor to 10,000 people. We have been to some other countries where you will find that they have 100 people per doctor. We need a revolution of the health sector. Let us, therefore, try as much as we can to ensure that medical doctors and personnel are given priority in our universities. They should also be trained so that they can take good care of our patients. Without healthy people, we cannot develop. If we have an epidemic in this country, we may find it very difficult to handle it. I remember there was a time when we had Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) here and everybody panicked because they do not know what to do. If the avian flu breaks out in this country, it will be very difficult to handle. So, let us set aside enough money for emergency. An emergence can happen any time without our prior knowledge of it. We should be prepared to deal with it, and enough money should be allocated to the Ministry of Health for this purpose. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, we have put up many schools using the CDF money but they lack teachers. I went to one of my primary schools recently and found that a classroom with 83 pupils had only one teacher. Surely, will such a teacher impart any knowledge to those pupils? We need enough teachers for our children. We should train and employ more teachers. Employment of teachers is now becoming difficult, yet we have many trained teachers who are not employed. Some of them have been at home for over 10 years after graduating from teacher training colleges. Last year, we interviewed one young man who was 46 years old. He had been trained 10 years back and was about to attain the retirement age before being employed. He said he had sought employment for 10 years, but never got it. He appealed to us to employ him, but the law says that one cannot be employed on permanent terms after attaining the age of 45 years. So, we must employ teachers who have completed teacher training. There is a big shortage of teachers in our schools. The excuse that there are no vacancies in our schools is not true. Let us allocate more money to the Ministry of Education, to enable it employ more teachers. We are able to build more classrooms and purchase books and laboratory equipment for our schools, but we have a shortage of teachers. So, I urge the Ministries of Education and Finance to come up with a scheme for employing more trained teachers for schools in our villages. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have problems of insecurity in our villages. Our farmers are attacked by thugs at night. The Government should intensify security in all areas so that our people have enough security. Our people should sleep peacefully at night, and then wake up in peace to go and work in their farms. Security is very important for the development of our rural areas. We should put up more police posts in our rural areas. We need security men there, so that they can help our people. Of course, there is a problem of our security personnel asking for kitu kidogo to do their work. This habit should be a thing of the past. We should pay our police men well and train them to be patriotic and to serve our people well. The Government should pay them well; some of them are working under very difficult and dangerous conditions. They should be paid well so that they can give good service to Kenyans. 1652 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES June 28, 2006 Our police officers should also be housed well. There is no police station with good housing units for its officers. Provision of good housing is one of the basic human rights. Our officers should be housed well, so that they work well. We must support better housing for our police officers. I also wish to appeal to the Government, and the Minister, to provide enough money through this Budget for the youth. The youth are the leaders of tomorrow. It is good that the Minister for Youth Affairs is here now. He should come up with programmes to support the youth. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}