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"id": 620240,
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"content": "for as long as Kanyari is alive. But there are some churches that have gone beyond the limit. You go into a town and you find a huge banner that poses a risk to even motorists, saying that the prophet is coming next week. When the prophet comes, you have to clean the roads, do a lot of ridiculous things, the tailors have a field day because you have to put on suits that are fairly long and look like robes. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I do not think churches should be excluded per se . In fact, we need to be much more vigilant with churches. If it is just a signage saying that this is a church, then that is okay, but if it is a signage saying that the prophet is coming, all hail the great prophet, I think that should be controlled and it should not be allowed to be draped across the road without the necessary approvals and revenue that would go to the county government. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, the approval process should not take too long. I have seen that the committees should take 14 days to make a decision and another 14 days to communicate the decision. We are looking at a situation where we want to increase the ease of doing business. If we get to the point where it takes you one day to incorporate a company, then it should not take you 28 days to get a license for that company to operate. I believe that the mover of the Bill can still go and look at this and make sure that the timelines are consistent with the overall objectives that this nation has of making it easy to do business. Sometimes when you want to promote an event which has a fairly short shelf life, it could be a music event or a jazz festival where you have just been given 30 days to put up everything and publicize, if you have got a long approval process, then that might kill the business potential. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I spoke about multiple applications in different counties. If we, for example, theoretically we say it takes 14 days to get a licence in a county and we are dealing with 47 counties, and you decide to do a waterfall approach where you apply one county at a time, it would take you 658 days at the maximum to get your approvals, and that is about two years. So, I urge that we look at those durations. I want to talk about transparency of revenue accruing from outdoor advertising. Various reports indicate that Nairobi City County earned about Kshs1 billion from outdoor advertising. If you look at some focus coming from organizations like PriceWaterhouseCoopers, (PWC) did an out of home market assessment. In Kenya, they predict that by 2017, the out of home market segment, which is basically outdoor advertising, will be worth about $153 million. That could be about Kshs15.3 billion. If Nairobi City County is only reporting Kshs1 billion, it means that there is a lot of money that is going into certain pockets. There is a lot of money that is going to people who do not re-invest it. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, even in my county, I have seen outdoor advertising billboards. But when you look at the income statements from the counties, our accountants only tell us about the money that is collected from cattle sellers and from market women. You will rarely see revenue coming in from billboards. So, these things are there, people are collecting revenue out of them and pocketing instead of depositing in the accounts as required by the law. It is, therefore, very important that we have a proper licensing framework so that all these things can be regulated and all these revenue can be recognized. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}