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"content": "causeways for two hours whether you are going in or leaving. So, our visitors have to wake up at 3.00 a.m. to reach the airport on time. I thought that when the Jubilee Government was going to celebrate in Mombasa, the first executive order the President would have made at the airport would have been: “Can you start building this road now?” He should have awarded it to a contractor and told him to build it to the internationally accepted standard. By now, we would have a dual carriageway. When President Uhuru was the Minister for Finance and he wanted to build Thika Highway, it was built. So, this road can be built. It is a small contribution for Kenya and it will bring value. The Port of Mombasa, like Sen, Wetangula said, can bring enough money to run this economy. In fact, Djibouti Port which is a very shallow port and which is doing a very small percentage of what we could do in Mombasa, is already making that desert country rich. In fact, they are now building a highway from Djibouti to Congo with the money from the port. In fact, their port is being run by the Port of Dubai. They are making millions of shillings out of that small port whereas we are wasting money. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, we should look at making Mombasa Port a free port. In fact, in our NARC manifesto, we said that we would build a free port in Mombasa so that people would come and visit Mombasa and buy goods. People would bring their goods from China, Korea, America and many other parts of the world and put them there without any cost. When you sell, you pay us some fee. Warehousing would be booming business. In fact, people visit Dubai not because Dubai is a very good place to visit, because it is very hot and sandy, sometimes it is too cold. There is really nothing beautiful to see in Dubai other than the hype and that it is a free port where you can go and buy something. If we did that for Mombasa, I think the world would come to Mombasa because, first of all, it is a beautiful place. If you look for a tree in Dubai, you will see a pipe under the tree because the water must be piped there for the tree to grow. In Mombasa, you can see coconuts and forests. For how many years have we been saying that we will do a free port in Mombasa? It has been many years and nothing is going on. No government has put any serious money there and nobody is doing anything about it. I wish we did that. One time I passed through Dubai and the taxi man from Pakistan asked me whether that was my first visit and I told him that I normally pass there from Europe. He told me that, that year they had done very well because they had 97 million visitors. Among them are those who visit for two weeks and below. He told me that most of them spend just about US$1000. He was telling me that the expenditure of each visitor generates about US$97 billion, leave alone the fact that those who go there also pay about US$100 for their visa which also translates to several other billions of money. So, actually, the visitors alone generate enough money to run the Dubai economy even before they sell their oil. The visitors to Mombasa would do the same. They would run this economy. We would not talk of 20 per cent salary cuts which we first say it is voluntary and, in the next sentence, it is compulsory. If you do not want to accept the 20 per cent pay cut, you go home and if you go to court, they will deal with you. All those actions and utterances are not necessary. 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."
}