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"content": "because they are men and women who deserve our attention. I support this Bill as well because it is giving effect to the Constitution that liquor licensing and matters related to the regulation of alcohol and alcoholism is a function of the county. I like one thing about this Bill that says that: Should it be that there is a conflict between national legislation and county legislation, in so far as matters of licensing of alcohol is concerned, the county legislation prevails. That gives effect to Article 191 of the Constitution on conflict of laws. That means that alcohol licensing standards and regulations do not have to be the same in all the counties. It means that you can actually go to a county that has banned alcohol completely. It is possible to have county x deciding to ban alcohol completely because that responsibility is upon county by county. If we want to achieve the objective of dealing with alcohol abuse, it is important that that entity called a county, starting from counties that are predominantly Muslim, where most likely not so many people are drinking--- If we can wipe out alcohol from those areas as we slowly come in to the other areas where we are supposedly Christians and we have so many people who are abusing alcohol, then we might be able to rescue the future generation from this menace. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I am only concerned with one thing when I look at various legislations in this country at this age and time. You realize that every legislation has an authority, a committee or some institution. As we look at all these things, we must be able to have coordination. Why would you want to create another big committee to just ensure that people do not drink and that a licence is issued or denied? Sometimes such responsibility should just be left to respective county assembly departments that deal with it and then that county assembly department coordinates any other person who thinks that he is responsible for that matter so that we do not increase the wage bill in the name of trying to have as many institutions as possible that are doing the same thing. Sometimes the problem of over coordination is that you will see people passing the buck from one institution to the other. We should also think about looking at this distance of 300 meters from nursery, primary, secondary schools and so on, and so forth. I think it is important that we contextualize this – and Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale was very clear – that Hilton Hotel is not very far from a primary school, but that does not mean that it is very clear that you can easily see or know where the people are drinking from. There is no way that people drinking inside Inter-Continental Hotel would affect children studying at Holy Family Basilica Primary School. So, I think the reasonability of the regulation must also be checked and so on, and so forth. Lastly, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I want to talk about counterfeits. The biggest challenge that we are facing and the reason why so many people died recently was because of counterfeiting. The genuine manufacturer of the so-called Senator drink – and I am sure soon there will be a Governor drink or a bottle called MCA drink – for the person manufacturing that alcohol to be protected, first of all, you have to register. So, it is important that every person who is selling alcohol across the country, using whatever brand, must be made to register that brand so that we know that somewhere, there is a responsibility. Secondly is that the institution dealing with anti counterfeiting and the other institutions that deal with this issue need to ensure that they protect this country from counterfeiting because the reason why people died is because they drunk – was it called Countryman – thinking that it was the normal Countryman . But someone else had packaged methanol and called it"
}