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"content": "described as a highway, as Professor has told us, cannot last for five years. You start a road from Maai Mahiu to Nakuru and by the time you reach Nakuru, the road in Mai Mahiu is gone. You go back and start reconstruction. In fact, what we do in this country is to sustain the motor spares industry in Japan and countries where we bring our cars from, because you have to put shock absorbers on your car every other month at the expense of other things. So, we must get these trucks off our roads. We must get the pipeline working efficiently and taking oil to the markets and bringing crude oil from Uganda to go and refine it. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I agree fully with Prof. Anyang’-Nyong’o. Now we are moving into the mineral extraction economy. For a long time, Kenya was the most successful non-mineral based economy in Sub-Saharan Africa until South Africa came on board. We were dependent on services. Now we are moving to stage two. One, I pray God the Almighty to descend on this country, so that as we go into the extraction industry to manage our economy, we do not go the way our brothers in Nigeria did, by abandoning the earlier mainstay of the economy of agriculture. When you go to our sister country, Nigeria, they import tomatoes from Israel and oranges from Italy. I hope that the Government of this country, today and in future, will spend the money from the minerals that we are getting to not only strengthen the agricultural sector, so that we remain the breadbasket of the region and the rest of the world; but also build first-class infrastructure, strengthen what we have and move to a different level of economics. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, oil is a wonderful thing but it can also be a terrible curse to our country, as we have seen in other countries, where oil comes and who benefits? It is the same Anglo Leasing and standard gauge railway people. You will find them owning oil wells and yet, our brothers in Turkana who have kept this oil for centuries are eating a dog because there is no food. It is a shame and scandal. The time to start is now. The Committee should not wait until vested interests are entrenched to the extent where when you bring a Bill here, somebody will be waiting out there in dark glasses, with a briefcase full of dollars, to influence legislation. They do this all over the world. You sponsor a Bill and the next day, they are at your doorstep to deliver goodies to you to abandon your Bill. The time to do it is now, when there are no vested and entrenched interests. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, when Norway first discovered oil, they set up what they call a sovereign fund. They capped the price of oil and said: “For the oil that we sell, any price above 30 dollars goes to a sovereign fund that nobody can touch, including the Queen until after 15 years when it matures to be released.” Today, there is no country as rich at pe r capita level as Norway. The money has piled and piled. They have got the largest sovereign fund in the world. I would want us to see a situation where we legislate and say that the moment we start commercial production of our oil, we lock dollars above 20 or 30 per barrel into a sovereign fund that nobody can touch, until after 50 years, for the future. Otherwise, all that you will be doing is getting a report, like what we saw from the United Kingdom (UK) yesterday, that ten richest men in the UK are richer than 40 percent of the population in the UK. That kind of scandalous behaviour is what Karl Marx called the ugly face of capitalism. We do not want that kind of thing. People want 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."
}