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"content": "in this part of the world in large quantities and is largely unexploited to date. So, it is very important that this Committee goes deeper into these issues. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, one of the challenges that we have had in this country is that these institutions which are listed here, in particular, the energy institutions, have suffered for lack of investment for many years. There is no Government – worse still those governments in Africa – which will have the financial capacity to actually invest adequately in energy. This is why when we were looking at the Report last month on geothermal, we had a situation where donors had to suspend counterpart funding running into tens of billions of shillings, because the Government does not have some Kshs4 billion or Kshs5 billion counterpart funding. This is a sector of the economy where we need participation by the private sector. But if there is a sector in this country where we have done poorly, as the Government, it is in this sector because we have literally locked out the private sector. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, look at the Kenya Pipeline Company. This pipeline is supposed to serve four or five landlocked countries that are dependent on the Mombasa Pipeline. It is supposed to serve Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan and eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), yet you will be shocked at the last investment that we made in terms of the storage at Kipevu and the pipeline. The infrastructure is so constrained that literally it is rationed through a process of transportation, for example, that they call allage for storage. For all those five countries that I have mentioned, we can only give them an allage or allocate them 30 per cent, because the 70 per cent of the imports on the pipeline and storage is actually going to serve this country. That denies this country a huge opportunity to export petroleum products to that region. What does this mean in terms of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? It means that we are actually losing significantly. This is an economy that would have performed at Kshs4 trillion or Kshs5 trillion, but today, we are struggling with half of that GDP, because we do not see the larger picture and need to invest resources here. Instead of pumping Kshs40 billion or Kshs50 billion into the laptop project, we should be pumping that money into the energy sector. That will give us the advantage of expanding our GDP significantly. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I want to encourage this Committee to have a serious discussion around these issues of energy, particularly investment in this sector. We have a capital market that is highly developed and capable of raising Kshs100 billion, I am told by the last Estimates, from private sector investment within one quarter. So, if we structure our companies in this sector and privatize them, we can get huge investments in this sector. Why would the Government be struggling to raise a few billion shillings for geothermal and power transmission and generation? Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, Sen. Keter mentioned earlier about storage. It is a serious matter, that we do not have any emergency reserves. The reason is because there is no capacity for investment by the Government. We have talked about it for years. We expect the Government to give the National Oil Corporation of Kenya (NOCK) money to put up--- We do not have resources. When you do not have teachers and nurses and your people are eating dogs because of hunger, when you are you going to invest billions of shillings to put up strategic oil reserves? 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."
}