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{
    "id": 383582,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/383582/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 233,
    "type": "other",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Madam Temporary Speaker, we also need to ask our governors to invest in capacity building because we cannot devolve functions to a government that cannot handle those functions. In order for us to create efficiency at the county level, we need to ask our Governors as well as the central Government to spend some money and some time in capacity building. By doing so, we will be able to, not only seek for functions that can come from the central Government, but we can also function more efficiently than the central Government. Madam Temporary Speaker, if you look at some of the areas that the Senator has proposed like education, if you visit the United States of America (USA), education is a state function and not a federal government function. Therefore, since we have been looking at the best practice elsewhere, education and many parts of education can be devolved to the counties. My colleagues have said it and I will repeat, there are some issues that a Cabinet Secretary or a Principal Secretary sitting in Nairobi in the Ministry of Education--- and as the Committee on Education in the Senate, we will urge that the money functions, especially the development of infrastructure and building of classrooms should not be handled by the central Government. There is no way that a Cabinet Secretary sitting in Nairobi will know what the state of a classroom is in Mukurweini or Kieni Constituency of Nyeri County. Therefore, let them give that function and the corresponding money to the Governor of Nyeri County who will handle the construction of classrooms. It is even more than this when you think about it. Most of those classrooms have already been put up by wananchi themselves. Indeed, I do not know anywhere in Nyeri, particularly in Mukurweini Constituency where I was a Member of Parliament, I cannot recall in my adult life a classroom that was built by the Government. All the classrooms there were built through Harambees and through our own efforts. Considering that we have already built them, there is no reason for the Government to continue owning them. Let them be owned by the Nyeri County. I think we should even go a bit more than the Senator is proposing. We should, indeed, amend these functions to include some basic aspects such as security. We are aware that as we sit in this House today, people have suffered in Wajir and Garissa as a result of clashes. When that happens, we have to move many people from Nairobi to go and secure these places. In other countries that have county governments or state governments as it were, there is what we call state police or state security machinery. We should be thinking of how we can also devolve some of the functions that are handled in Nairobi to be handled directly by those people in the counties. For example, if we had a quick response unit in places where clashes are common as we are seeing now in Wajir and Garissa, perhaps, we could have saved lives. No Kenyan should be killed by another Kenyan simply because he comes from a different community or tribe. We condemn the killings of Kenyans in Garissa and Wajir. Madam Temporary Speaker, you saw it for yourself in today’s papers, where the Governor of Mombasa has gone out of his way to secure police vehicles for his police in Mombasa yet the command structure is central. We are being told that a Governor cannot sit in a security committee and yet the Governor of Mombasa is the one who is supplying the vehicles that are being used by the same security forces. It does not make sense. The The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}