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"id": 45528,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/45528/?format=api",
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"speaker_name": "Mr. Ethuro",
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"legal_name": "Ekwee David Ethuro",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, speaking after Mr. Wetangula is a bit of a challenge, because I must admit that he has raised all the pertinent issues that the Minister needs to consider. I want to commend the Minister for Public Works and the Minister for Roads for bringing this Bill to the Floor of the House. I serve in a committee known as the Constituencies Fund Committee (CFC), and so I have more than passing interest in this particular Bill. I have had occasion to call the Minister for Public Works âMr. BQsâ. This is because whenever we go to his offices for the Bills of Quantities, you can be sure they are inflated at the very minimum ten times and to the maximum of 100 times. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I am a bit disappointed with the content of this Bill. When the Minister was moving it, I really expected him to tell us the kind of work he has done, including what led to the collapse of the National Construction Corporation (NCC) that died many years ago, and what lessons he has learnt. This would inform this particular Bill. This House needs to learn from the Minister, who has had the opportunity and seen it at work, so that we know that this Authority will try to mitigate some of the shortcomings of that other corporation. I also want to agree very strongly with Mr. Wetangula that, indeed, there seems to be, in my view, the greatest value and contribution of this Bill--- Minister, I did not want you to be disappointed; but I will disappoint you on this one very strongly. I think we are not just creating opportunities for employment. Although creating employment is good in itself, it should not just be created for purposes of employment without the real task being performed. What is our problem? We have the Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA) and all these other roads authorities. Both Ministers never made a single comment on their performance, so that when you come to this House to ask for another Authority we can say; âyes, the existing ones have added value to what we have been doingâ. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, when responding I would really want the Minister to address some of these issues. Looking at the total contributions by the hon. Members, he should make some serious and substantive amendments to this Bill. The Authority only needs money from the Exchequer for three years. After that, it is supposed to be self-sustaining. I thought the Minister would go further and say, âThree years, I need your money, three years I will sustain myself and forever I will be giving some money to the Treasuryâ. If I am investing money in the body and you are telling me now that after some period you will not need my money, then it means you will be generating your own money. I want you to generate sufficient money to also bring me a return of my original investment. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I cannot agree more with Mr. Wetangula, again in terms of getting money from the contractors. You can. If you are a State regulatory body, you cannot go back to the same people you are supposed to be overseeing and demand money from them. Minister, please, we do not want to bring the amendments. You do them. Delete that one because there will be a serious conflict of interest, because you cannot bite the hand that feeds you, as they always say. It is, therefore, very important that we consider that. The Board is being proposed to do capacity building; for whom? Is it for the contractors? I thought you were supposed be going out there to the market and ensuring that we get the best. What we expect, and what this country needs most, is an Authority that is going to supervise work. It is not acceptable that you can do a nice road and after two years you see those big potholes. It is not acceptable that you construct buildings, and before they get completed, you find they are already collapsing and killing our people. Once in a while you see everybody crying and even going to the site, but what happens after that? What we are looking for is not a Government entity that allows people to build on what they consider road reserves, and then even the Prime Minister goes there, the President goes there and when the buildings are operational you come back and tell us they were on a road reserves. Where were you when we were building? That is the kind of Authority we are looking for, an Authority that will be on the lookout from the very beginning, so that no construction will take place if it has not met the standards. The standards must be assured before the construction actually takes place. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, from the experience we have--- I really want to say that one of the good attributes of this Minister is that he has always been available to the Committees of this House. He has really provided leadership in the Ministry in terms of what we need to do. However, the Minister is held back by the cartels. Let the truth be told! The civil servants we have in our Ministries are holding back our Ministers. After we formulate policy here, they go back to them and they decide what needs to be done. You are given Kshs700,000 as the Economic Stimulus Package money, then you are told that you can only construct a classroom at Kshs1.5 million. When we had occasion to ask the Minister how much he spends in his constituency, he told us Kshs500,000. There are many âchiefsâ who are involved in the construction; the chief architect, the chief quantity surveyor among others. There is a simple English saying; too many chefs spoil the broth. I think when we have too many chiefs, they spoil the construction industry. We want to appeal to the Minister on what is reasonable. We said that you should change that code. I do not see any function of these authorities that would ensure that those codes are changed. We will not allow public money to be spent in the most expensive manner. As long as you are meeting the requirement of tendering, you can get the price even ten times. If you walked into a super market, you would know what the price of a particular item is. During those days when the law was not very clear, people would vary contracts beyond what was allowed by the law. What confidence has been put in this Bill to inspire us that what we are even proposing here will be followed? Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if there is any capacity building to be done by the Authority, the Minister must target it to the local contractors. What has undermined the Economic Stimulus Programme which was supposed to stimulate economic growth of this country by rolling out that expenditure within a defined period of six months is the fact that our local contractors, even when we made it obvious that they must be there, are not given those opportunities. I have challenged the officers concerned that if they think that our contractors are not good enough, they should put in place a programme of action to build the capacity and plan within a reasonable period so that we know what will be done. This Authority should then follow to make sure that, yes, in Turkana, there are sufficient contractors who can do a good job. We do not need to import the contractors from elsewhere. Just as we do not like foreign contractors to come to this country, we also do not want our own contractors to be ferried from every place, undermining capital formation within those communities. One important issue over which the law will never help us is supervision. As long as you leave people on their own, unless they are self-motivated and of high ethos, this is what is killing us. This is what is even destroying the performance of Government. That is why we voted for the Constitution. The Minister for Justice, National Cohesion and Constitutional Affairs is here and he would do better than talking a lot. We should have devolution so that that management is taken closer to where the action is. Part of the problem is caused by the Minister. Even within the CDF, there is a requirement that we work with Government officers. The quality of Government officers that we are sending out there is wanting. They are never available, are not competent enough and you demand that there should be some certificate of compliance. Those certificates of compliance have become sources of rent seeking. Mr. Minister, you can only address that mischief by ensuring that there is tight supervision and management of these projects. You should demand the reports. Again I think the new Constitution will save us there because our Ministers have been more interested in playing PR for Ministries than finding out what is there although this should not be an excuse. We want Ministers who can come back to this House and tell us what they have done with the Economic Stimulus Programme money. You should not wait for hon. Members to ask Questions. Only this morning, we were being told about a Treasury which does not even know how much we get in terms of foreign direct investments. You want me to be confident of my Government when it cannot even do additions of the money that is coming in. How do we even know whether it is not money from money laundering schemes? There are some basic things that we do back home and only require knowledge of kindergarten arithmetic. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, with regard to procurement, the Minister could do very well if he does not use the Public Procurement and Disposal Act. I want to agree with the contributors who have spoken before me. We seem to worship the procurement process, irrespective of the outcome of the process. We are interested in value for money. We are not interested in what comes out of the system. We could as well just say garbage in, garbage out. We even said within the CDF that you must give us special consideration in some areas where the volume of the business concerned is not subjected to that lengthy provision. Once you have an arbiter as you have provided for, if someone wants to appeal, let them appeal to the High Court and that will be the end of the story. We have had it! The last time the Government organized a meeting with Parliament at the Intercontinental Hotel to look into the issues of roads, we identified this as a problem coming from Government, and you promised us that you were going to look into that procurement process. Up to now, we have not seen anything being done. If these issues were addressed, the Kitale-Kapenguria-Lodwar-Lokichoggio-Nadapal road would have been tarmacked by now. We would now be talking of tarmac in terms of past tense. If there is one role that the Board must play correctly, it must maintain standards. If it identifies how many layers of tar you are going to put on a road, it must be measurable and you must go out there and measure. If you decide that you are not going to allow this kind of tonnage on a particular road, it must be enforced. We will support the Minister, but we want him to look beyond this. We want him to look at the attitude of his officers. We do not want them to look at the law as an opportunity for making money. I have an example; I own a few trucks as I try to exit myself out of poverty to the world of riches. I also try to be a very good citizen and abide by all the rules. So, I make sure that I have all the requirements on the windscreen of the truck so that I am a law abiding citizen and then a policeman stops the truck at a roadblock and says; sasa ukijaza hii yote, sisi tutakulia wapi ? It is in their interest to find some fault instead of appreciating this citizen who has complied with the law. And they are not even pleading. They say that they will even remove something from there so that they find fault and then you are expected to do something. When you do not, they just tell you: W eka kando . This is the reality of Kenya that we want to bring to bear towards proceedings of this House. These are the things we should be on the lookout for because we can make very good laws, bring very good Bills, make amendments to them but at the end of the day, we will not be improving this country. We owe it to ourselves, to our leadership and to our posterity and to this country. We should get things done the right way. With those few remarks, I support the Motion."
}