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"id": 27826,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/27826/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Mudavadi",
"speaker_title": "The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Local Government",
"speaker": {
"id": 84,
"legal_name": "Wycliffe Musalia Mudavadi",
"slug": "musalia-mudavadi"
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"content": " Thank you Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for notifying me on that. I will shorten my presentation so that I can allow many Members to contribute. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I beg to move that The Urban Areas and Cities Bill (Bill No.38 of 2011) be read a Second Time. In moving this Bill, I would just like to, first of, all give some background that by and large in Kenya, the issue of management of urban areas has been structured and placed in Cap.265 - The Local Government Act. Over the years, people have discovered that that particular law has had a lot of defects and they needed to change and alter the way cities and urban areas are governed. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this particular provision is covered under Article 184 of the Constitution. Within the whole context of devolution, cities and urban areas are going to become entities within the county government. One of the things that we seek to achieve through this Bill, as Members will look through it carefully, is that in enforcing devolution, we want to make sure that in the 47 county areas, it is clearly known that the county government is the superior government. This is very important. Therefore, urban areas and cities are units within those county areas. The authority is, therefore, vested in the county government and the management of cities will be subsets in this context in the management of that county. This is a very important principle that underpins the whole aspect of devolution. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, you will find that this Bill seeks to eliminate certain mischief. For instance, in the past, a Minister for Local Government would just walk and transverse the county, come to a particular place and declare it a town council, city council or municipal council, without any clear classification criteria. It was more of a political game rather than anything based on fact, data or criteria that would be useful to justify the status that the Minister was conferring to that particular town or region. With this, we intend to provide a mechanism that can be understood and audited before an area is conferred city status or even municipal status for that matter. The other thing we are bringing out in this Bill, which is of very critical importance, is that we cannot have elections because elections are at national level and ward level; that is the two-tier level of Government. We do not have a three-tier level of Government. What we are proposing here is that when it comes to the governance and management of urban areas and cities, I would like Members to look specifically at Part III of the Bill. The provisions from there onwards provide a new format of managing our urban areas and cities. What we are saying, if we are taking Nairobi as an example, Nairobi is a city and also a County Government, the same will hold for a place like Mombasa. Since there are people who are already elected as County Assembly Members"
}