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{
    "id": 656242,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/656242/?format=api",
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    "content": "day brainstorming on the status and the future of devolution. We will also invite governors but as participants. This is because this will not be a meeting for the Senate, Council of Governors (CoG) or county assemblies. It will be a devolution conference where all stakeholders must participate but it will be spearheaded by the Senate being the guardian angel and the protector of devolution under our Constitution. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, time has come for us to face reality. The reality is that we are staring at a national crisis. There is a lot of hope that devolution can help us fix our problems which we have lived with for many centuries. However, there is also a huge threat that this country is almost grounding to a halt. Thieves have sprouted all over this country and they are using devolution as a conduit. I do not know where these thieves have been but all of a sudden, they have ganged up and sprouted all over this country. You see small fellows who have never got employed by anybody go get a job in the county where there is no structure; a very junior person who has left college goes and gets a job at job group ‘T’. Some civil servants in the national Government have been working for the government for years. I can see Sen. Hargura who used to work for the Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KERRA) as a public servant. For him even to reach job group ‘M’, he must have invested many years of service. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, all of a sudden, there are these youngsters from college. They go and start at job group ‘T’, a salary of Kshs300,000 and over and above that, the kind of opulence and manifestations of plunder that they are showing is an indication that it is not even about the Kshs300,000 which is already inflated; the fellows are moving in convoys of cars, they have bought every plot which is available in the town, they built five buildings at the same time and you cannot tell us that this fellow has any other explanation except that he is stealing. We cannot watch as our country goes down. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, in the first year of devolution, some of us and I know many colleagues were very vocal about this thing. The matter was politicized. Some of us were accused of fighting devolution. Today, the chickens have come home to roost. We must find a way of immediately stopping the plunder of the resources of our people. Whatever it takes, - I want to go on record in this Chamber - if we must amend the Constitution of our country, to remove itchy fingers from the coffers of county funds, so be it. We must begin that discourse now. This time round, we must do it in such a way that we do not retreat. I want to call on my friends and colleagues in this House, those who are still holed up in party politics, there comes a time in the history of a nation when the nation is superior to political parties. We must descend from the towers where we have ascended; the towers of ethnicity, the towers of political parties and respond to the cry of our people who are dying because of preventable diseases, who are dying because of poverty yet a lot of money has been devolved to our counties. Finally, we have been told that sometimes we are being too critical on county governments. They are new, they are having teething problems and that we are being critical on county governments without visiting the same criticism on the national Government. I want to say that, our business in this House is to oversight and impose The electronic version of theSenate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}