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{
    "id": 424040,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/424040/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 104,
    "type": "other",
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    "content": "but for some of us, there was no food. Since we have this opportunity to be here, we should not be scared of corrupt leaders. We should fight them to make sure that the common wealth of this country goes to people who are disadvantaged like Turkana. There was a little boy in Kakamega called Cleophas Malala. He wrote a play last year called “Shackles of Doom”. In this play, he was painting a Turkana where he will find doctors, engineers and the shop owners working there being either Asian or some other non-Turkana tribes of Kenya. We had to fight because the Government did not want Kenyans to see what had started building up in Turkana. In the process, the Government moved and banned the play. I would like to share with Members that one of the greatest sons of Africa, the former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, is one of the few people in Africa who supports President Robert Mugabe in the Indigenization Programme of the Indigenization of Resources of Zimbabwe. I was reading a presentation that was given by Thabo Mbeki to the East African Community (EAC) in a speech. Thabo Mbeki says, the reason why Robert Mugabe is being condemned is because he is doing what we should have done at the beginning. Before we explored our resources, we should have first of all put the resources in our hands. You can be sure that if Mugabe succeeds, those who will want the diamonds of Zimbabwe, those who extract the diamonds will have to beg Mugabe or his successor by convincing him that they will give him 50 per cent and not the 5 per cent that has been given to the African Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member states. The way forward – the way I see it in this Report – in terms of geothermal and even the oil that we have in Turkana is to avoid going the route that other African countries have gone. To me, it should be our primary objective, as a country, that if we need 500, 1,000 or 5,000 engineers, specifically trained to extract minerals from the ground, we should take them to the relevant universities in the United States, UK, Germany and elsewhere so that the people doing the job are our own people. The Government should deliberately develop indigenous owned mineral extracting company. This may sound to be very difficult but a few years ago, you would not have imagined a situation where indigenous Kenyans would own construction companies. However, we now have success stories like the Kirinyaga Construction Company owned by our former colleague, Eng. Ephraim Maina. Owing to poor governance, people like Nyoro and Kirinyaga Construction Company cannot succeed because those who are in power want to give the contracts to multinationals from China and deny the local contractors an opportunity. This craze about China is a balloon. It is nothing because there is nothing indigenous that comes from China. China simply copies and pastes from the United States, Britain and then they pretend that what they have belongs to them. When did you see an American hawking in the streets of Nairobi? When did you see a British national hawking in Nairobi? However, the Chinese are hawking. You will see them with fake cell phones and so on and yet we speak very highly about them. No, that is not the way to go. There is nothing special about China. We have to refuse and develop our own local potential. 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."
}