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"content": "make bricks are absolutely unregulated. Secondly, they do not pay cess although they have access to a natural resource almost freely on which they should pay cess. They do not even pay for the roads they use. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, one of the biggest fiascos in counties at the moment is that the county governments give tenders to people to make roads with very little standards being obeyed. Within a short time, a road is opened. Within no time, it becomes a series of holes and valleys because the sand traders have come with huge trucks whose weight cannot be supported by those roads. You are an engineer and you know that when you are constructing a road, you must have in mind the kind of vehicles that will use that road. On how many wheels does a truck run? A truck with more than six wheels cannot possibly run on a rural road to harvest sand from a river. However, that is what is happening. County governments are facing a nightmare. They should use this particular section of the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution to have regulations so that the trading practices can be fair to all. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, sub section (7)(c) of the Bill talks of fair trading practices. In other words, if you are a sand harvester, please realise that the road that the lorry will use is also used by the boda bodas and mamas on their feet going to the market. It is not just for you to use a six wheeled lorry to go and harvest sand, destroy the road completely yet that lorry has not paid a single cess or toll that can be used to repair the road. Giving the county governments the responsibility of trade development, including fair trading practices, was an extremely important provision in the Constitution. It relates directly to Sen. Wamatangi’s amendment which says that all the businesses and traders must be brought under the rubric of MSEs and be subjected to regulations so that we have fair trade practices in the counties. As Sen. Eleachi said earlier, if you look at the economies of counties, for example, the City of Kisumu, ten years ago if you walked down Oginga Odinga Street, you could stand 100 yards away and waive to somebody down the road because there were very few people on the streets. However, that cannot happen now because the street is teaming with people walking around. A famous political economist, Adam Smith, in his writing said that populations are the most important factor in economic growth. When you have more people, you have a bigger market. However, you can only have a bigger market if they have goods to buy and money to buy the goods. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, our people are very ingenious. When the traders see more people walking on Oginga Odinga Street, rather than allow those people to enter the shops to buy in the formal sector, they bring the goods to the road. In fact, the market on the streets is much bigger than the one inside the shops. The traders have seen that population walking along Oginga Odinga Street as a market. They bring shoes, belts, baskets, sodas and many other things on the street. This means that particular market has to be regulated. Those people should fall under some regulations and protection as traders and not be chased away at will as any government wishes. In the event that you do not want these people to put their goods on the street because you want other people to move as well, then a peoples’ market should be created. In Mexico, for example, one of the biggest markets in down town is called Mercado Cuidadela. Cuidad is a Spanish word meaning city. Cuidadela is a small city within a 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"
}