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{
    "id": 584610,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/584610/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 229,
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "that this august Senate which has now taken the bull by the horns because no other Parliament has brought up this issue of historical injustices to the level where we are now want to deal with the issue to finality. This is the first time that historical land injustices are being addressed and courtesy of the Senator for Makueni. I wish that we approached this issue in a non-partisan manner knowing that every Kenyan has a right, historical right and current right to be where he is. Coming to the issue of land use, there is total abuse of land use. During our recent visit to China, I expected to see all the land occupied by the billion of people who inhabit that county. However, I was surprised to find out that there was expansive land for agricultural productivity. There is historical injustice being meted on us by land planners. In this country, land planners and surveyors are the ones who have been on the fore front, purporting to fight for land injustices. Mr. Speaker, Sir, it is unfortunate that they have let us down because they are the ones surveying on riparian land which should be protected yet they are the people involved in illegal land allocation and planning roads which cannot be used by motor vehicles in this day and age because they are very narrow; the townships which are now supposed to take a majority of our people because agricultural land is no longer adequate. We should be planning to concentrate people in settlement schemes and have many townships and promote them to grow to urban centers and municipalities and free agricultural land for agriculture, perhaps even jointly as is the case in China where even if you have 100 or two acres of land, you do not necessarily have to live on those two acres and another person’s acres are amalgamated together and farmed jointly. That way, mechanization and high productivity is possible. That is the direction that we should look at as we talk about agrarian reforms. We are reforming agriculture and we have to do it, we have to look at how to plan our urban centres. Mr. Speaker, Sir, our municipalities were well planned by the colonial Government, and I give credit to them because they planned out urban centers, however; our recent urban centres have no master-plans. I think that it is high time we looked at the Municipalities and Cities Act to ensure that we develop our urban centres well. The way the Act was enacted is that a municipality would only be a municipality after attaining so much population. However, we should be proactive in a manner that we plan a municipality from zero. For instance, we can plan Konza City as a municipality so that as it grows, those facilities come in. We do not have to wait until an area has become full of shanties before we think of establishing a municipality."
}