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"id": 251659,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/251659/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Omingo",
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"speaker": {
"id": 180,
"legal_name": "James Omingo Magara",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, thank you for giving me a chance to contribute to this Motion. I want to thank the Mover of this Motion, which is long overdue. We are travelling on roads that were built at Independence. The number of vehicles plying on those roads have grown immensely! We are wasting a lot of money on fuel. That has a knock-on effect on our foreign exchange because the country has a very expensive mode of transporting goods and services. It is high time our road network was improved for Kenyans to get an efficient, economical and effective communication network that will encourage investments. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the time that people waste in jams along urban centres amounts to a lot of money. That money could be used to develop this nation elsewhere. If we improve our road network, we shall reduce the cost of transport drastically. If we take the example of Malaysia, Kenya was better in 1970. At one time, the then Prime Minister of Malaysia visited this country and borrowed the Kenya Bus Service transport network and introduced it in Malaysia. Today, the Malaysians have underground transport and fly-overs. They even manufacture their own buses! They are way ahead of us and yet, we were comparable at the time of Independence and immediately thereafter. We need to re-think our position, so that we can improve the transport network and reduce the cost of production. If you import a vehicle from Dubai, you pay about US$150 per container in Mombasa. But if you move that container from Mombasa to Nairobi, you pay close to US$300. That even deters other investors to come and invest in our country. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we need a policy where people in estates or particular regions can share motor vehicles in the morning or evening, and reduce the cost of transportation. We need to give incentives to our people to pool resources and share vehicles to de-congest our April 26, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 691 roads. We should also construct the by-passes which never came to pass. We had a system of Kenya Urban Transport Infrastructure Programme (KUTIP), which was sponsored by the World Bank. It nearly flopped because of graft. The people involved in KUTIP, whose aim was to improve transport in urban centres, were very corrupt. But we can also use our resources, which we have in abundance, to improve our road infrastructure. We can do that by having our priorities right and procuring efficiently. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, there is a lot of wastage in procurement. You also know that roads are a major cost component in terms of budgetary provisions. Beyond that big cost, there is a lot of corruption in terms of procurement. The contractors keep on inflating prices. A road that was meant to cost about Kshs50 million ends up costing about Kshs500 million because of wastage. The inefficient way of doing things is also marred by corruption. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have some by-laws that negate development. For example, the City Council pretends to maintain roads. The people in Industrial Area have suffered enough by being disconnected from the City Centre. But if they want to construct that road, the City Council by-laws do not allow them. They do not allow anybody to construct a road, even if they have no resources. They only pretend to maintain the road. We should liberalise those laws and even privatise the way we do our road network. We should encourage people, especially manufacturers, to plough back their profits and construct roads within their areas of operation. Even when we take money from public coffers, we do not get services. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the kind of roads that we have today are not even marked. When it is misty or foggy, you cannot identify where the road starts or ends because of poor visibility. Our roads are in bad shape and yet, we have not prioritised what we need to do. Crops go to waste in farms. A poor woman who has spent all day cultivating and weeding her"
}