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{
    "id": 404377,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/404377/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 221,
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    "content": "to accept an argument by the Senator which says that I did my job, whereas at the local level, money has been misused. I have said this time and again; that Senators and Governors in the words of former American President Benjamin Franklin need to appreciate that you have to hang together or you will be hanged separately. It is important that we have to sit together, agree on development, have an agenda and vision for the county being driven in one direction or in 2017, we will be hanged separately. It is important that all of us come together to think through the vision. You cannot tell me that out of five or 40 elected leaders in the county, only one has a vision and the others are just supposed to follow. It is important that we bring these visions that we have for the county together and push them through the County Development Board. That is why I support this idea of the County Development Board because it will avert situations of corruption and give us an opportunity to oversight. Madam Temporary Speaker, public participation is a very important concept in leadership. There is a chapter in the County Governments Act - I want to be very proud to have contributed to its drafting - that talks about the protection of the minority and the marginalized and participation of the public. If you go to some counties you will realize that there is an ethnic majority and in one corner there is a particular ethnic minority. This ethnic minority has elected a Member of Parliament and some Members of the County Assembly and when they make decisions, in most cases because of the nature of politics in this country, you will find that they belong to one particular party. So when they reach the county assembly, they become the minority political party and their decisions are overrun using the tyranny of numbers. But if they have an opportunity where a Member of the National Assembly is elected from that community and the Members of the County Assembly are sitting together, then they will have that opportunity to be able to speak to each other. This is Kenya, but I want to be very candid. If you go to Bungoma, you will find that in some corner there, a very beautiful mountain called Mount Elgon, there is a constituency that largely has the Sabaots, but the rest of the county is formed by the Luhya Community. Now, they have a Member of the National Assembly and a few Members of the County Assembly. It is important to ensure that the Member of the National Assembly is not pulling in a different direction inciting the community, perhaps against the county government. To do that, they have to have an opportunity to sit together through the County Development Board and agree on certain issues. If you go to north eastern, you will find a situation where all the Members of the National Assembly come from a different clan, may be a Senator comes from a different clan and the Governor also comes from a different clan. Let us take the example of Trans Nzoia County where there seems to have been some form of coalition that one community brings the Senator and the other community brings the Governor. Now, if these two people cannot sit together for development of their county, why was there need for that kind of coalition in the first place? In fact, I am opposed to the amendment that one of the Senators was suggesting that we need to remove the deputy governors from the meeting of the County Development Board because in the true sense of it, in most counties, the Deputy Governor is contributing to a coalition in a county. If you go to Nakuru, you will have a 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"
}