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{
    "id": 518068,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/518068/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 406,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Gaichuhie",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 17,
        "legal_name": "Nelson Ributhi Gaichuhie",
        "slug": "nelson-gaichuhie"
    },
    "content": "After talking to the Attorney-General, he referred us to Section 2 of the Urban Areas and Cities Act, 2011, which defined “urban areas” to mean municipalities or towns. Sections 9 and 10 of the same Act further provide for the criteria for eligibility of an urban area to be classified as a municipality or a town. We rejected this Bill for the aforementioned reasons. We also noted that the location of headquarters of any county or district is always left to the people of the area to decide. We normally call leaders from all walks of life within the district or county to have a consultative meeting and agree where the headquarters should be. For those reasons, we found that we did not have to legislate where the headquarters of a county should be. We also considered and noted that we have other areas like Baringo, TharakaNithi, Kiambu, Laikipia, Nyamira, Nyandarua and Meru among others, which even currently are in dispute over their headquarters. We thought that if we decided to legislate on where headquarters should be, we will be going against the wishes of the people. The Constitution of Kenya provides for public consultations. We are very sure that before this Bill went through, there were no consultations in the counties to have agreed to use these channels to have their headquarters stationed at those particular areas. As you know, towns and cities are expanding. I would like to take a case in point of Nakuru County. It is a very expansive county with its headquarters in Nakuru Town. Nakuru Town is fast growing and very soon we might find that the headquarters is very congested. We have vast tracts of land. We can purchase other areas and decide, after consulting the general public of the whole of Nakuru County, to locate our district headquarters elsewhere."
}