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"id": 487138,
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"speaker_name": "Hon. Aden",
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"legal_name": "Aden Bare Duale",
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"content": "Article 227(1) states that:- “When a State organ or any other public entity contracts for goods or services, it shall do so in accordance with a system that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective. “ Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, what we are trying to do in this report, unfortunately, even in the amendments we have proposed, is to say that the Government proceeds. I have a problem with this particular direction of the report. It is like we are giving a go ahead for this project to continue without--– Of course, we have put conditions to say, subject to adherence of the law. I want to state very clearly that the Safaricom deal must meet the threshold of the Constitution, if we have to approve it. As I have read from the Constitution earlier, it must be transparent and competitive. We need to know why only one entity is to be given that particular project. That is in order to ensure that, all the time, we defend our hard earned coffers from the taxpayers. We should also ensure that we get value for the money for any procurement. We should also do all we can to eliminate corruption and ensure that there is accountability. I stand to say that the project which is being given to Safaricom must meet the test of the Constitution. Otherwise, it will be unconstitutional to proceed on with the contract. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, the other point I want to make is that, in the process of us trying to care for our security, it should not be an excuse for us to violate our laws. Violation of our Constitution and procurement laws, indeed, amounts to irregularity. Indeed, over and above that, violation of our Constitution in terms of violation of human rights, by our security forces in the name of defending our own security. We have heard in this House this afternoon that an hon. Member was almost in tears when she explained how she was harassed and manhandled by agencies of our own security. Agencies of our own security, indeed, our military; who deployed them to go and erect roadblocks in Garissa? This House has not approved the deployment of the military to man roadblocks! I am a frequent Member in this House and this House has not deployment the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) in Garissa. But as a resident of Garissa, I can assure you that KDF is in operation. It is manning roadblocks and this is a clear violation of our Constitution. We must not allow this to happen and rogue commanders to deploy KDF personnel where they should not be. Indeed, even other deployments that were done before the promulgation of our Constitution, including the deployment of KDF in Somalia, should be brought to this House to be regularized and approved by this House. As I conclude, I want to say that safety of our information is very critical. As we go into this issue of automating and making software that will recognize and pick information of intelligence, I have a lot of concerns. Indeed, as a young country, we can be subjected to hackings by expert hackers into our intelligence system. We have seen lately how they have hacked into our KDF systems and even threaten our financial systems by hacking into them. I want to say that we must be very careful not to award this tender to a foreigner. We must be careful because we will have critical intelligence information of this country in the hands of foreigners who can misuse it. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, as we were being brought up, we have always known--- We were told that Americans are people who love their country very much. But 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."
}