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{
    "id": 674864,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/674864/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 210,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Tong’i",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2611,
        "legal_name": "Richard Nyagaka Tongi",
        "slug": "richard-nyagaka-tongi"
    },
    "content": "based on the money available. So, the question is: If the contracts were given on the basis of the monies that the county governments had, what happened to that money? Why is it that the county governments have so much unpaid bills? It clearly goes to tell us that the level of MCAs or the kind of oversight at the county levels is not good enough and is not going to help our country. If you look at what is going on in the country today, there is a lot of burning of schools and all the MCAs and all the leadership of the county governments do is pass the buck. For example, in Kisii County we have experienced burning of a lot of schools. Notwithstanding the fact that we have one of the best Cabinet Secretaries in the country in the name of my brother Fred Matiang’i, all the county government has embarked on is to malign his name and make him look so bad and make the issue of burning schools look like a Kisii issue. That goes a long way to tell us that sometimes our county governments miss their priorities and focus their energies and efforts on non-issues. We should all team up and condemn in the strongest terms possible the burning of schools. I do not think it is the time to pass the buck. I do not think it is the duty of the county government to look for excuses to justify what is going on. We need to support this Bill. We need to build the capacity of our county governments, right from the MCA to the members of the county executive committees, to the directors and even to the governors and deputy governors. More often than not, they are fighting over issues which do not really add value to the county governments or enrich the vision that Kenyans had when we established the county governments. We believed by having the county governments, services would be offered to our people more easily than it had been in the past when we were doing it from Nairobi. The county governments collect a lot of money. We can excuse them for some teething challenges. At the initial stages, we would understand that they had teething challenges. But you cannot have teething challenges from year one until the end of eternity. There has to be an end to those challenges. We cannot keep on blaming the systems as the reason why we have not been able to achieve the targets. The question one would want to ask is: What happened to the monies we used to collect in the market centres? We still do it; actually, we have enhanced the collections. Where does that money go to? What happened to the budgets? Do our MCAs have the capacity to oversee those resources? The uniform answer that we get in almost the whole country is that we were not prepared for this but we have to start somewhere. I am grateful that we have started. This Bill should have come much earlier. Probably, we should have had it before we started the county governments because then we would have mitigated the kind of challenges we have experienced as a country. Our people have lost resources and opportunities. Even the hiring of employees at the county level is not done well. If today the friends of the governor wake up and say they want to have some opportunities in the county, they simply create them and people are employed. There is no system which guarantees fairness in recruitment at the county level. I think that is not fair; it is not right. That is not the vision that the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they were drafting the Constitution. We wanted services which are fair, transparent and affordable. Fairness should be felt so that everybody else can enjoy and say this is where we wanted to be."
}