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{
    "id": 661041,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/661041/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 282,
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    "speaker_name": "",
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    "content": "Some of these healers would even even tell you that if you have a certain kind of symptom, you go to a certain place in a certain forest where you get a bark of a tree or roots, mix with some leaves from a certain shrub and you would get well. There is no magic. It is just traditional knowledge that certain plants can cure certain diseases. Is it protected under law? It is not. What have Western multinationals done in this country? They come under the pretext of being tourists, go to some part of Kajiado, Tharaka-Nithi or Makueni County; find out what our parents used to do in case of diseases, and are directed to plant species from which they extract biological material. In modern science, you do not have to carry the whole tree to Europe in order to reproduce it. You only need to extract a microorganism; cell or enzyme and that can help you to grow a forest. You can genetically produce a plant by just getting a small part of it. We have had a lot of theft and I will give two examples because I know my time is running out. There was a case in Lake Bogoria. There is an area protected by Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) with certain enzymes growing in the water on the shores of the lake. The enzymes have components which are useful in the manufacture of a cancer mitigating medicine. I am told that around fifteen years ago, some tourists went and paid US$20; the little money they pay as tourists to access the lake. Their aim was to extract that material. You just get some water in a bottle and go to the airport. Our airport security does not check these people properly, yet when some of us go to Europe and Scandinavia we are checked like criminals. This happens to even important people like everybody in this House. Sometime you altercate with those customs officers and tell them you are an important person where you come from and you have a home. If they do not like you, you can board the next fright back home. They think we are refugees who have gone there to look for jobs. This enzyme or microorganism was extracted, taken to a laboratory in Switzerland, and multiplied. It has been used to produce a drug used to mitigate the effects of cancer using chemotherapy. Some of those drugs cannot be afforded by the people of Kenya and many developing countries. Once it is patented, it is a product of Switzerland, and Kenya gets nothing out of it. I have already given an example of traditional medicine because that is a huge area. The drug industry, hon. Senators, is a multi-billion dollar industry. We can protect some of these things, and only require technological transfer because we lack the capacity to transfer that into a viable drug industry. In the near future, we must demand technological transfer so that in ten years or so, we are able to do what they do in Switzerland and start exporting drugs to the rest of the world. My last example is the area of traditional music and folklore. Everyone in the world knows that if you want to identify a person from the Maasai Community, the red stripped cloth and the moran dance is almost synonymous with the Maasai culture. The dance is very challenging because the moran has to jump and keep escalating. There is a cultural joke told without the intention of demeaning any person, but just to make people laugh. Some morans were singing and jumping while being ferried in a Pick-Up truck."
}