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{
    "id": 668749,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/668749/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 338,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Dr.) Nyikal",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 434,
        "legal_name": "James Nyikal",
        "slug": "james-nyikal"
    },
    "content": "about the health of plants and what affects sanitation of the health of plants. So, what we are talking about here is to a large extent disease control, be it human disease, animal disease or plant disease, and food safety. If you look at that within the East African Region, there is no way you can have control measures for those issues separately. Some of you may remember not long ago we had the Rift Valley Fever across East Africa and if you wanted to control it, you were to do that regionally. The control of trypanosomiasis has always been done across East Africa. Malaria is across East Africa. Human beings and goods move together. There is a story of somebody who was arrested in Migori because he was moving with fish from Tanzania into Kenya. He asked what was wrong as he had bought the fish and he was going to eat it. He asked what law he had broken. Our people have always known that if you want to control diseases, they know no boundary. We must support this Motion. The other reason is human and goods movement. We cannot stop it. Some of us know that we had a Vice-President in Kenya whose brother was campaigning in Uganda to be President. That is basically one region and people move like that. As I child, I remember we could move from Dar-es Salaam by the East African Road Service all the way to Gulu. Nobody asked you a single thing and people still want to move like that. They wonder why we, politicians and Government officials, are thinking that there is need for papers. So, with that movement, you have to put controls. My third reason is that it is our constitutional obligation. We are clear in our Constitution that if there is something that we have made an agreement on, we must go on to ratify it. Under the EAC, there is the WTO Protocol on SPS that has been signed and we are part of that. We cannot come round when in this Parliament and say that we want to think differently. We were part of the WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) Commission that was agreed on and the WHO C odex Alimentarius that was signed by all countries in the world. We are doing what we need to do by law, namely, our own Constitution. For this reason, I do not think we need to say many things. We should ratify this Protocol. It was done at the East Africa level five years ago and we are still talking about it today. Sometimes, we put too much emphasis into politics. I have noticed that when we discuss important things here and politics come in, tempers rise. I ask myself why tempers rise when we deal with politics, but when we are talking about important issues like the health of our people, people doze. It is amazing. I support."
}