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"content": "There is so much pressure to settle people on one, three or five hectares of land, which is a bad policy. This policy is not going to lead anybody anywhere. I think that we would have used this opportunity that we have displaced people in our country and, in fact, not only those living in camps are calling themselves displaced but the sons and daughters of this country who are still living in their homes are calling themselves IDPs because they do not have land of their own. Therefore, we are going to have the IDPs all the time. Perhaps, it is better now, that we take the opportunity to address the issue differently. I look at the IDPs that we have in this country and I think the way to go at the moment is to secure a 1000 acres of land for those 50 IDPs, give them the land as a communal land, let them get 10 or 20 acres, build themselves a school, a police station, a small market and leave the rest 999 acres of land to use for what land is for, it is a means of production, they can produce the food from that. That would have given us a living example of how best we can use land in our country so that we do not drive ourselves into this perpetual poverty where we are going to collect money by deceit from people in the name of harambee. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, there are other things we could have done to avoid driving ourselves into this position and these are all in the way we drive our policy. Let me give you an example of the health sector. We have, within a very short time driven ourselves by the way we spend the little money we have in curative health services. We have left what we would have saved and reduced our expenditure if our main policy was to drive primary health care. Currently, we are spending only 3 to 4 per cent of our money in the health sector. I believe all that money goes into curative services and, in fact, it is not adequate. But if we were to spend 5 per cent of our money in primary healthcare, we would have educated our people on how to live healthy lifestyles, how to eat healthy foods and how to detect some of the diseases early. In doing so, we would not be hustling with lifestyle medical health problems and it would have been much cheaper if we went into primary healthcare than into curative healthcare, which is now loading seriously on the budgets that we have in our country. That is, in fact, the reason why you cannot refuse attending most harambee functions because they touch us. These are harambees which are meant to help somebody who has suffered a heart attack or kidney failure to be rescued in some institution and they require that kind of money. This is what we have been reduced to. The only avenue we have is to do harambees. Had we, in fact, reinforced primary healthcare 10 or 15 years earlier, it is possible that those individuals would not be suffering from failing kidneys, heart attacks or heart failure. We would not be having all these problems had we taken that route. In fact, it is not too late to do that because it is the right thing to do now. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I do not need to say much about this monster called corruption in this country. Corruption in the country is distorting everything that would have been done normally. It is now practiced in this country as a normal procedure or thing to do and this, perhaps, is where we probably need to spend a lot of our energies. This will help us build a society that can sustain and maintain itself without vulnerable individuals. Families or people in our communities suffer because of the effects of this proposed law. We are dealing with communities and we cannot legislate here that the communities shall not help each other or that they should not hold harambees . I am glad 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."
}