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{
"id": 369944,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/369944/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Hon. Mulu",
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"speaker": {
"id": 1955,
"legal_name": "Benson Makali Mulu",
"slug": "benson-makali-mulu"
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"content": "Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I rise to oppose this Motion. I am not opposing it because the issues being raised here are not important but it is because I do not think the establishment of a Disaster Management Authority is going to be the solution. When we look at what is happening in this country today, we have a number of institutions which can handle the mandate of disaster preparedness, for example, the issue of roads and bridges. We are all talking about roads and bridges being washed away by floods. But if you look at what is happening, we have the Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KERRA), the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) and the Kenya National Highways Authority (KENHA) which are charged with such responsibilities. I want to give an example. During the last rainy season, a number of drifts were washed away in my constituency. I went and talked to the roads engineer and he was ready to do all the necessary repairs but he did not have the money. He requested for the funds to do the work but he was not allocated any money. So, what I am thinking and my position is that even if you create this authority, it will be another way of overloading the Government. It will increase our administrative expenses; recurrent expenses will be more than what they are today and instead of focusing on the problem, we will have another authority which is not financed and which will be crippled in terms of operations. So, what I would propose is that instead of us thinking of creating another authority, the Government rationalizes the functions and it is made very clear who will be in charge of what. At the same time, let funds be provided for when we have such problems. For example, when we look at rivers, we have a number of authorities. We have the Tana and Athi River Development Authority (TARDA) and the Ewaso Ngiro North Development Authority which are supposed to take care of things like flooding because they manage specific rivers. But you find that when these things happen, their hands are tied because they do not have money. They have not been allocated any money to do their work and instead of saying that we establish a new authority, we would be better off to propose that we find a way of forcing the Government to give more resources to these authorities so that they do their work efficiently. The other thing is that if you analyse some of the existing authorities, you will realise that some of them have serious governance malpractices, including corruption, mismanagement, nepotism, et cetera . I do not think that if we create more authorities we will be able to stop them from doing things in a similar manner. Therefore, I propose that, instead of creating the proposed new authority, we find a way of ensuring that the Government avails resources to the existing authorities, so that when we have disasters, they can take care of those Kenyans who will be suffering. In my view, creating another authority will not help Kenyans. We might be making things worse since we will have to think about hiring more people and, therefore, incurring more Recurrent Expenditure. Instead of channelling that money to help Kenyans, it will go into paying salaries, buying cars, renting offices, et cetera, which will not be helpful to Kenyans."
}