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{
    "id": 470316,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/470316/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 45,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "laptops to school children, have you trained teachers sufficiently in Information Communication Technology (ICT) to help these children? I think not. I just did a quick calculation on how many children we have in Standard One. This year, we have 1.4 million children in Kenya. Assuming that laptops cost an average of Kshs50,000 each, that is a whooping Kshs70 billion. This is enough to reconstruct a standard gauge railway line from Mombasa to Malaba and spur the growth of our economy by perhaps 20 or 30 fold, then get enough money to put into the education sector and other things. Mr. Speaker, Sir, there are so many questions around these laptops. You are giving a laptop to a Standard One child but have you provided for storage? Where are they going to keep them? Do they have power to charge them at home? How many rural homes have electricity? Do they have teachers to teach them? I already said there are none. This is the kind of misguided policy that CORD Coalition will continue pointing out in this country; that our priorities must be right. I hope that this is not another case of London taxis where crooked business people are waiting in the wings to supply these laptops to children without caring whether they will be put to good use or not but cut their profits and run away. I want to urge this Senate to be patriotic and point out these questions to the Government and advise them that their priorities must be right. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I expected the President to come out very clearly and say that our number one trading partner is Uganda and beyond. We also have Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. Kenya must invest in infrastructure for our economy to grow. Instead of this misguided supply of laptops to schools, let us have a railway line running from Mombasa to Kampala, Bujumbura, Kigali and to Goma. This will turn around the economy of this country. Look at our roads, you construct a road this year but within one-and-a-half years, the road is torn to pieces because of trucks and yet we have a railway line that we have completely neglected and ignored. I expected the President to clearly come out and say that this Government is going to correct the imbalance that this country has suffered for so long, the imbalance where some regions of the country have more roads than they need, have more water in their pipes than they need, while in other areas like where you come from, children only read about tarmac roads in books. They read about piped water in books. I expected this Government to say that having done 50 years of Independence with misguided and mismanaged policies, it is now a new turn to say that apart from the Mt. Kenya region, Western Kenya also needs tarmac roads. Lamu and Eastern also need tarmac roads. Where is the policy here?"
}