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"id": 398836,
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"content": "6.00 a.m. just to look for a-20 litre jerrican of water. They will come back maybe at 10.00 p.m. at night; it is a whole day’s job and that mother would not have cooked for her children. She would not have done anything just because she has to get the water first to actually even do the cooking. Things like cleaning and washing are luxuries when it comes to their lives, because you first have to get water even for your own daily needs like cooking and drinking. So, water is a matter of life and death. That is why we even hear of cattle rustling and you will find that it is traced to competition for water. So, in about 70 per cent of this country which is arid, water or lack of it actually is one of the main sources of insecurity. So, when we say ‘water is life,’ to some of us, it is more than life. It is an issue of whether you will live or not, not because of lack of water, but because even your own security depends on whether you have water near you or not. If you do, then others will come and you will have to defend that water source and, as a consequence, your life will be at stake. It is not like what we have in other areas, where we just open a tap and you get water flowing. Sometimes you have to put your life on the line just to get water to drink. Even for any development to take place in any area, first, you must have water for people to settle and for you to have institutions. So, water is everything to some parts of this country and it cannot be taken for granted. Madam Temporary Speaker, the Motion is urging the national Government to initiate and formulate water harvesting policies to guide water harvesting programmes in the counties. As it is right now in the arid regions of this country – and I am talking of arid regions because maybe the policies need to be more stringent in those areas other than in the other areas where water is abundant. There should be policies on how the water is used and on the sharing. But in the arid areas, even how you access those water sources or how you conserve and get it first should be the priorities of the policies. The arid areas are water deficient in the sense that, maybe, it is only two months in a year when we have rain; and sometimes that rain even fails to come. Of late, climate change has even made it worse because of erratic rain cycles. When it rains, it is either too little or too much, resulting in flooding. So, either way, even the weather patterns have changed and, therefore, we have to come up with very sensitive policies which will also cater for the climate change factor. How do we also take that into account when we are coming up with these policies? Right now in those areas, people depend on ground water; that is what has been mentioned here. We have drilled boreholes everywhere. We have been told that a lot of water has been discovered in Turkana, but what we have not been told is that, that water is 600 metres below the ground. Therefore, to access that water, we will not use the normal rigs that we have around, which do about 200 or 300 metres or maybe 500 metres. More sophisticated equipment is needed to pump water from 600 meters down the ground; you need very powerful generation and pumping sets. These are poor communities, how do you actually even sustain that in terms of maintenance and the running costs of those generation and pumping sets, which will be prohibitive? The water will be there, but accessing and using it will be very costly. Madam Temporary Speaker, the other issue is on the quality of water. Two weeks ago, there was some news coverage; a documentary by KTN, talking about cancer in 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."
}