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"content": "to share the revenue with the communities who believed they were the owners of the resources and who were also suffering from environmental degradation that came with it. There is now some semblance of peace. In order that we deal with this early, I know that Sen. Musila is closely watching a lot of coal in his county. Another county is looking at iron ore. Kenya is likely to be one of the producers of steel from our resource. But if you went there and gave that resource to some Chinese company, as was proposed earlier by the national Government in Kitui, and then the Chinese Government just extracts the coal and takes it to China to manufacture steel, and residents of the County of Kitui just watch as this is going on, I can tell you that within one year of that extraction there will be conflict. There is no need of trying to talk as if we cannot see this coming. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I have listened very carefully to my sister, Sen. (Dr.) Zani. She has mentioned that it could be either way, at 75 per cent to 15 per cent or something like that. It is very difficult to define a community. The closest community, which means the closest village, will then say that they are entitled to ten per cent or whatever it is. Sometimes this can bring in more conflict. Now that we have accepted, as a fact, that we have Government at the county level, we could as well devolve it up to there. We could say the county governments will be entitled to a certain amount of revenue from the royalties and revenues. I do not know how this will be worked out. But it is important, as a principle to agree. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to urge the Mover of this Motion to talk very closely to Hon. Mwakwere because until recently he was the Minister in charge of the mining docket. He had very good ideas on what to do with Kenya in terms of mining. He believes that, in fact, other than oil, which I am sure my brother from Turkana County will talk about, that we can be a very rich country if we extracted our resources and made the revenue available to ourselves. The problem we have right now is that most people come here as prospectus. With the prospectus licence of some given kilometres square, they extract a lot of gold, minerals and other stones which are very valuable, they do this for years because they are “prospecting”. There is no revenue that the Government collects from them. Other than the prospecting license which is Kshs20,000, they can prospect for 20 years. I know some of them who have earmarked certain vast land in Migori County, for example, where they have been prospecting gold for the last 30 years on large tracts of land. The Government does not get any revenue. The county government does not know what they do. We must start afresh and make laws which county governments will use to make sure that we get what is ours. The sharing of it must also be helpful. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I do not want to talk for long. But as the Chair said, water is a resource. Wind, currents in the ocean and forests are all forms of resources that we can talk about. But I am sure my sister was referring to minerals that ordinarily the Constitution already gives to the national Government. But we hope that the national Government, while extracting and taking these royalties, will apportion that royalty to the governments that we have created at the local level, so that we can benefit from what is ours. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I support the Motion. May God bless Sen. (Dr.) Zani for bringing this Motion. 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."
}