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    "id": 480468,
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    "content": "recognition, share and must benefit from the mineral. The report recommends 30 per cent. This is a recommendation that we can refine, recast and fine tune when we get to legislation in dealing with the Bill that is in draft form. In the last Government, we had a Bill that went up to the Cabinet level. I look back and see that we could have done better on the proposal that gave 5 per cent to the community that has been the custodian of the mineral; 14 per cent to the county where the mineral is found and the rest goes to the national Government. I think we did this without reflecting on the national Government’s capability - as we can see now, of misapplying and misusing these funds to the extent that the county governments may not benefit. I would want to see a situation where the report recommends that the county where the resource is found is upped, at least, by 20 per cent. The people who have been the custodians of the resources can still remain at 5 per cent and that will up to 25 per cent in the same county. The remaining 75 per cent will be part of the sharable revenue that will go to the national Government. The county where the mineral is based will still get a share of the 75 per cent. If our referendum goes through, the 75 per cent will be shared at 40 per cent to 60 per cent between the counties and the national Government. The sovereign wealth – I have not quite gone through the draft Bill but I want to encourage Dr. Zani and her team to go the Norwegian way – once locked in, it does not mature for expropriation until after 50 years so that we can build the Fund. That is why Norway today is awash with money. For instance, if they are selling oil, they cap their prices at maybe US$60 a barrel. If the price is US$100, US$40 automatically goes to the sovereign fund and remains locked there. That is why you find countries like Botswana lending huge sums of money to the World Bank, African Development Bank (ADB) from their Sovereign Wealth Fund. This is because they can expropriate it internally. They can only lend it out to make more money so that when it matures, it comes back. For the record, Botswana is the highest lender to the World Bank in the African continent, much bigger than countries with enormous resources like Congo. Congo, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria are recipients. You can see what happened to my favourite West African country, Ghana. They found huge deposits of oil and in five years, they are supposed to hit 2.5 million barrel per day mark. However, the country is now headed to a direction that I shudder to imagine with riots and all manner of things. That is why in this country, if people can steal land in semi arid areas, you can only imagine what else they can do with our gold, iron ore and everything else that we are trying to find. We have people whose backgrounds and conduct are proven to be those of near fraudsters. When you hear them talking and shouting and looking holier than others, you regret knowing them. The next level of regulation that should come in the Bill – and some countries have done this, including Australia – if you lock in a percentage of the resource and say about 15 per cent of the resources, as you split it out, shall go to improvement of infrastructure for the next 15 or 20 years so that we cannot have people coming from Siaya to see the Thika Superhighway running from Nairobi to nowhere. We want superhighways all over the country. We want to see the artery of our economy – the 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."
}