Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 517218,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/517218/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 238,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, if we put the gains of harambee on a scale, they outweigh the bad deeds that have happened. Saying that we do away with harambees in this country is throwing the baby out with bath water. This Bill anticipates as much. It anticipates that we cannot do away with harambees, but we are only putting checks. That is fine. However, I find the implementation a problem. The problem in this country is not with the laws. We are very good in making very good policies and paper work that we pile somewhere. How will we make sure that a parent in Kapedo whose child was admitted to a national school - and there is a timeline up to when they should be admitted to a school – can raise money? How then do we subject them to the application procedure for a permit that has to be vetted and still has to be subjected to referral to the national committee on the same? We need to review that procedure because those bureaucracies will kill the dreams of many people. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, we, as a country, must not substitute policies with harambees. We need to have constructed enough classrooms so that we do not need to do harambees. That is the ideal situation. We need to have enough medical centres that have proper medical equipment. We also need enough doctors so that we do not need to take our patients to India for treatment. We also need enough money from the Government to actually offer universal education for children. Ideally that is the situation, but realistically it is not. We are still very far. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, this is a good law, but we need to remove every bottleneck because it will be very difficult to implement it in the villages, where for example, money is needed to transport a body from Nairobi for burial in one or two weeks’ time. We cannot treat these harambees in the same way as the Beyond Zero Campaign or any other campaign of such a magnitude. We cannot have them on the same level. There must be some form of categorization. The rogue cases that I have experienced are maybe two or three out of ten cases, which I think is not so bad. We can work around making sure transparency is ensured. I can assure you that even during the campaign that will be done in 2017, some aspirants will still go through the same harambee system. However, the corruption that has infiltrated that system is using that contribution to get political mileage; to look “bigger” than the other or use public resources to lie to other people that it is actually your money. We should remove those bottlenecks; that I do not have to apply to some committee sitting somewhere in the headquarters of a county when I am in a far-flung area. We cannot subject our people to that. We must not lose the gains that harambees have done in this country. I find it very difficult to support this Bill, but will be interested to see maybe at the Committee stage, what amendments will be brought to remove the bureaucracies, make this process simpler and segregate the big magnitude harambees from the small harambees in the villages that actually help our people. This is because as it is, we are still not where we would like to be - a developed country. People living below the poverty line are still very many. We cannot then pretend that everything else is fine. Eventually I would hope that with the right management of the country and mindset of 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."
}