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"id": 527487,
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"content": "Committee (PIC), for example, in Parliament, a parastatal that was doing very well, the National Housing Corporation (NHC), which built many houses for low income and middle income Kenyans, and those houses are still there up to this very day, performed because it was professionally run by people like S.G Anyang. The time that AFC was working very well, they had things like the Guaranteed Minimum Returns (GMR), which guaranteed farmers returns for their investment in agriculture, even when there was drought and they lost their crops and their animals. So, we cannot say that public corporations are, by their very nature, inefficient, they are not. Under proper governance regime, public corporations can perform wonders in terms of capital investment, growth in productivity and expansion of the economy. Subsequent, up to 1978 and, unfortunately, these years coincide with the regime of Daniel Arap Moi, parastatals started to do very badly, precisely because they lost the original management skills, professional management, honesty and efficiency and they became avenues for primitive of accumulation, personal aggrandizement, rooting, corruption and so on. Therefore, subsequently, there was a move particularly, by the World Bank and development partners to recommend that parastatals be would up for purposes of privatization. Now, we live in a kind of funny state of affairs, whereby, we have not really effectively supported privatization completely in the whole economy, but nonetheless, we still need certain parastatals. However, this is not the time to invent in new parastatals. This is the time to use existing parastatals, re-tool them and make sure that they perform their original mission better. Everything written here in this Bill can be done by the AFC. If you look at the Fertilizer Board of Kenya, membership of that Board is more or less reflective of the membership of AFC. The Bill states that; “3.The principal Act is amended by inserting the following new section immediately after section 2- 2A (1) There is established a body to be known as the Fertilizer Board of Kenya (2) The board shall be a body corporate with perpetual succession and a common seal and shall, in its corporate name, be capable of” The membership in 2(c) is-; “The board shall consists shall consists of the following persons appointed by the Cabinet Secretary (a) the Chairperson competitively sourced and appointed by the Cabinet Secretary; (b) the Principal Secretary in the Ministry for the time being responsible for Agriculture or his designated alternated not being below the level of Deputy Secretary; (c) the Principal Secretary in the Ministry for the time being responsible for finance” . All these entire Principal Secretaries (PS) and government representatives, you will find them in the AFC Board. So, why do you create a board where the people going to do the work already exist in a board in the same sector and all we could do is create a strong department or directorate in the AFC and let this work of dealing with fertilizers be done at AFC? Let us efficiently run the AFC as it was run in the 1960s and it produced very good results. 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"
}