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{
    "id": 419523,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/419523/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 217,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, in fact, reducing the salary of even all the civil servants by 20 per cent does not help the country. If we only plugged the waste or the kind of allowances that I was reading in the newspaper over the weekend by a lawyer who was advising the Prime Minister then, on tea and all those other things, I can tell you that we can save enough money. I read one sentence which said that a civil servant earns Kshs40,000, but earns allowances to the tune of Kshs400,000. If you look at it, he would gladly accept the 20 per cent salary cut and earn the Kshs400,000. So, we are not helping anything. We must think in terms of dealing with the waste and with the abnormal allowances and several other out of town and out of country meetings which are very expensive and do not earn us much. On the standard gauge railway, I support. I was in Mombasa when the President was launching this project because I support it. This is because a port that does not have an evacuation strategy is a dead port. The port must know that goods will come in, in large quantities, and must be moved quickly. They can only be moved quickly if the railway line is working properly. Right now, whoever is running our railway line is only doing 6 per cent of the job that they are supposed to do. In fact, now it is going to 3 per cent. I do not know whether they still feel like running it because if you are running a machine which is giving you an efficiency of 3 per cent, then you should abandon it. But somehow they are still running it and I hope they are making some money out of it. A standard gauge railway which will be moving at a specific speed and pulling sufficient cargo at the required speed and decongesting the port will make our port the port of choice for everybody internationally. In fact, people from East Africa will start depending on Mombasa to take their goods to West Africa through some railway line across Africa and we would make even more money from that. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, the refinery has collapsed. It had to collapse because the technology being used there is dead technology. Our own companies that buy oil from there have said that they cannot buy fuel at that price. They do not want to offload that cost to us because we would be complaining. So, it had to die. What is important is that when it dies, we invest in a proper refinery; a larger, more efficient one with cutting edge technology so that the refinery can help us make money even from people who want to refine and move their oil across the world. They will come to Lamu, refine their oil and will take it and sell it wherever they want to sell it. We will be making money from that refining business. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, let me finish by talking about geothermal energy. Geothermal energy is the cheapest source of energy. We are lucky that in Kenya we have a few wells that produce enough geothermal steam which we can use to generate very cheap energy. But sometimes Treasury does not understand the thinking of the Government. The Government is saying that we want to produce so many megawatts of cheap and clean energy within a specified time. But when the Treasury does its arithmetic, sometimes it refuses to give the Geothermal Development Corporation just Kshs100 million which would help them to drill one other well. So, sometimes the Treasury should be working in tandem with the Government; looking at where the Government wants to go. This is because a delay of one year will be a delay for a long time to meet certain targets in energy that we require. 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."
}