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{
    "id": 501344,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/501344/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 154,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Baiya",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 8,
        "legal_name": "Peter Njoroge Baiya",
        "slug": "peter-baiya"
    },
    "content": "sought to be addressed by the new Constitution. These are the shortcomings that the national values in the Constitution under Article 10 sought to reinforce within the new constitutional system. The Leadership and Integrity Chapter Six of the Constitution sought to reinforce values that are going to help in the delivery of services by the Public Service and by the general leadership to ensure that these services are delivered. Under Article 232, the values and principles of Public Service are well enumerated there including high standards of professional ethics among others. Parliament, under Article 232 (3), is required to enact legislation to give full effect to the entire Article 232. Among the challenges the country has experienced is lack of professionalism and low standards of professionalism. If you look at the reports of the Auditor General time and again, year after year, they highlight staff in the Public Service who have a responsibility to ensure accountability of public funds, yet they do not do the actual reports. Where they do them, they do them shoddily and do not fully capture the relevant information. They even go out of the way to defeat the whole purpose of accounting leading to inefficiency and loss of public funds. That is just one example with regard to the Public Service. This Bill requires officers to be accountable, professionally efficient and competent. It will make it a duty of the Public Service to ensure, first and foremost, that the officers given responsibility have the competence, integrity and capability to deliver those services. We believe that the enactment of this Bill will help the country to resolve so many of those challenges emanating from incompetence and underperformance. It requires the Public Service to develop standards of competence and performance. This will ensure that the caliber of standards in the Public Service measure to the best practices mainly in the private sector. The Bill has enumerated other requirements such as the giving of information. That is in Clause 8. Public officers are responsible to give honest, accurate and timely information to the public. This is going to have very far reaching ramifications. The current practice is that public officers feel that they are not under any obligation to do that. There is no law in this country compelling them to give accurate and correct information to the public or even to other key stakeholders who require this information. This law will legally bind them to do that. For this law to be operative, there are other Bills, not necessarily having deadlines for implementation, but nevertheless very necessary for the proper and actual application of this Bill. I have in mind the Access to Information Bill, which has been developed. We have met with the relevant Cabinet Secretary and it is before the Cabinet. This Bill is also important because it sets out the mechanism and process under which information held by State officers can be accessed. Not all information can be disseminated merely because a public officer has an obligation to provide information. Some information may have security implications if divulged. Some information may be private and confidential, for example if a public officer has access to personal information that relates to privacy of some officer, it may also be information that has commercial implications if it is improperly divulged. The Access to Information Bill as well as the Data Protection Bill is therefore, very critical. Without the enactment of these two key pieces of legislation, it will not be very effective to actualize or implement the clear provisions of Article 8 relating to the management of information. 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."
}