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"content": "especially for people in leadership positions to survive. Leadership positions do not just mean us, politicians, but even civil servants, policemen and so on and so forth. So long as you are a wage earner, you are likely to be subjected to fundraising which is not necessary. I understand when something like a health bill under our system, it is necessary; or funerals – but those should be limited. I think funerals should not be turned into huge feasts for consumption, but it should be for essential services. But even then, if you have an insurance scheme like a benevolent fund – like what teachers have – which includes the last rights of a person, then there will be no need for a funeral harambee . Some insurance schemes also include last rights as part of their insurance cover. They make sure that they provide enough money to cater for last right expenses for those who contribute to this insurance. If these things happen in a modern society like ours, they will reduce the need for harambees . So, rather than have laws for safeguarding how harambees should be conducted, we should have laws safeguarding how public fundraising should be limited to real areas of need. Public fundraising should not be open rather excessively to expenses which could be easily catered for through a proper public system of supporting them. There is no need of saying, for example, that we are re-basing our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), therefore qualifying to be members of a world other than the third world and saying that our economy is the ninth-fastest growing economy when we do not, in that same breath, say how we are improving the standard of living of our people and how we are protecting our people from a psychology of dependence, which harambee is. Because then, our rapid growth rate is not being matched by our public policy and our social programmes. So, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, the essence of this Bill is, one, to deal with the mischief that harambees have created. One of the mischiefs that is observed in both the Koigi Wamwere’s Report and our Report is the corruption which has crept into sustaining harambees. If you are a Cabinet Secretary (CS), a Principal Secretary, a Senator, a Member of the National Assembly (MNA), a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a parastatal; a Member of County Assembly (MCA) and you are expected to attend harambees at the rate we are doing, obviously you are going to get money from somewhere, not necessarily from your salary or the allowances that you get. You are given those allowances to perform your functions; they are not given to be taken away to other people who have outsourced their responsibilities. If you use that allowance for that, it means that you will look for money to perform your functions elsewhere and that is where corruption comes in. You can only deal with corruption if you also deal with its causes. Harambee is one major cause of corruption because it compels people, by its very nature, to look for resources to sustain it; people who are honest enough to support harambee through their allowances, pockets and so on, and so forth and in the process get embarrassed. I know that Senators get embarrassed when they go to certain functions because you are there as a Senator and the master of ceremony is trying to ridicule you by saying “Senator so-and-so is present, how much money is--- but before we go to him let us just go to somebody who just got a contract from a governor another day and has a lot of money to throw around.” I mean really; that a person will 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."
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