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{
    "id": 591426,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/591426/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 149,
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    "content": "necessarily within the term of the President in office but beyond, a more stable decision making body like the Senate, should be involved. For purposes of forming a Government, the President wants to make a quick confirmation of the kind of Cabinet Secretaries and Principal Secretaries that he can work with; the exercise is left to the National Assembly so that the President can quickly form the Government and start discharging his duties as manifested in his manifesto. Madam Temporary Speaker, through this draft we want to go for a national conversation on the need for us to have increased resources to the counties. We have agreed on 40 per cent. Members of this House and the Committee agonised over this for a very long time before we settled on 40 per cent. Without the risk of preempting the debate, I want to tell you of an experience we had when we looked at the accounts of the County Government of Nakuru. It is amazing that in Nakuru County, revenue collected at source and the money allocated directly as devolved funds, as conditional and unconditional grants is approximately Kshs10 billion. It came as a shock to us that Nakuru County, highly funded as it is; the Governor spent only Kshs841million in a financial year on development. It does not matter even if you have devolution in Nakuru County for twenty years, for as long the Governor continue spending 10 per cent of what he receives on development, Nakuru County will go nowhere. This is the conversation we want to carry out. We either want devolution that will have immediate deliverables or we do not want it at all. Madam Temporary Speaker, there is an issue of oversight. This Draft is attempting to give the Senate more teeth so that we are able to carry out more effective oversight on the counties. It is a pity in all the counties that we have looked at. I normally invite the Senator of the county in question together with the nominated ones to join us in the discussion and it is just coming one after the other that the Senator is actually irrelevant. In the case of Nakuru County, some of the things we were asking in Plenary during the session, the area Senator had earlier written to the Governor asking him to respond to them. It means that we are just an entity that is ignored and which nobody cares about. We might be celebrated in the court of public opinion, but effective wise, we are not there. Madam Temporary Speaker, I now want to go into a difficult area. I would like to beg for an understanding that this is my personal view for which I have committed myself that if we are in this country to change the lives of our people, then the use of public resources must not only be respected, but also applied to areas where it is strictly needed. I, therefore, want to open the conversation in the minds of Kenyans that, three years down the line, we are now wiser because we have the benefit of hindsight. Time has now come for us to speak looking at each other as men, women, youth, the disabled and everybody straight in the eye and ask ourselves what we want the cost of administration, the devolved and the national governments to be. Every time I interrogate this issue, I feel that the following issues must be addressed so that the cost of that structure that supports governance in this country can be affordable and be fruitful. One of them is the way provincial administration, simply put, is parallel to the system called devolved government. Many and principally almost all, the functions that the county and regional commissioners do, are actually a duplicate to what the governors are doing. Let us not 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."
}