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{
    "id": 453911,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/453911/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 403,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Abdi Mohamed",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1188,
        "legal_name": "Mohamed Abdi Haji Mohamed",
        "slug": "mohamed-abdi-haji-mohamed"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity. From the outset, I want to say that I oppose this Bill in the strongest terms possible. Firstly, this Bill has been prepared in a hurry. It is not a well thought-out Bill. Probably, it was meant for settling political scores in the ongoing supremacy war. Therefore, we should not be drawn into that war by this Bill. We cannot sit in a forum that authorises public expenditure and then come back to Parliament and purport to oversee that same forum. We will not have the moral authority to play oversight over such a forum. On that basis, therefore, this Bill must be opposed. Secondly, as Members of Parliament, we already have a problem with the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF) Committees, where we just sit as ex-officials on the basis of the principle of separation of powers. We now want to sneak through the back door and sit in a board which takes care of the funds of the county. On the basis of the principle of separation of powers, we must steer clear of those boards to allow the governors do their job. Hon. Speaker, the Constitution of Kenya gives governors the authority to run the counties. We have five years to find out whether they will have done their job or not. What the Senators are trying to do is snatching that authority through the backdoor. That is not proper. We should give the governors some breathing space. Let us give them a chance to prove their worth. We should allow them to implement their agenda. As politicians, we should appreciate the fact that everybody would not have the same development priorities. It looks like the Senators, with the help of Members of the National Assembly, want to impose their priorities on the counties. That is not right. We do not have to support that initiative. Long before the counties came into being, in the 1980s, we had a programme called “District for Rural Focus”. After that, we had the District Development Committees (DDCs). Thereafter, we had the District Steering Groups (DSGs). At those forums, development programmes were discussed and coordinated. Everybody was involved. The Bill before us is exclusionist. It is going to leave out the development actors. Before the counties came into being, the organisations that drove development at the county level were the NGOs. This Bill has excluded the NGOs and so many other development actors that I cannot enumerate. This is an exclusionist Bill and, therefore, on that basis, we should kill it. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}