Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 530668,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/530668/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 108,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Karaba",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 232,
        "legal_name": "Daniel Dickson Karaba",
        "slug": "daniel-karaba"
    },
    "content": "Thank you very much, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, for allowing me to contribute in support of this Motion. This is a very important Motion. It is significant in the sense that it does not require a lot of interpretation, it has been there in the past and we have lived in it but it is only that we have been ignorant to a very large extent. If you were to go some years back, especially when we were in school, there used to be a very serious consideration of a day called the Commonwealth Day, which was observed. For those people who might not have been there then, the young boys and girls in school planted trees and made sure it grew to a point where it could be harvested. So long as you were in that school, you were supposed to take care of that tree. It made our environment green at that time. The population at that time was not as high as it is today, considering that we have more than 15 million pupils and children in schools. If today there was to be a law that every child has to plant one tree, every other year, how many millions of trees do you think we can have in 10 years’ time? We would have many; but the problem is that we sit here, talk, go abroad for benchmarking, and come back without having learned any lesson out there. We waste a lot of time and money as we make trips out and in for no reason. The reason for this one is spelt in this Bill in the environment. If we were to study this Bill critically, we would not lament over the shortage of rainfall, serious soil erosion on our farms. We would not be talking desertification which you ably amplified when you were contributing. You said that every other year, the desert is moving closer to where people are, and this is a very serious problem. If those are empirical examples and we can see the evidence, why then must we wait until we have a catastrophe? Why do we not curb or prevent that from taking place? We can prevent it by planting trees as we did before and we can reintroduce those by-laws which were there at that time because they are useful. If you asked every child to plant a tree in every school and location in the 47 counties, I am sure most of the counties would be green, there would be a lot of tap roots to arrest the soil from being eroded, there will be a lot of evapo-transpiration coming 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."
}