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{
    "id": 704704,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/704704/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 290,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "In my county, there are wards that fall under the multinational tea estates. The road network is properly developed and water systems are in existence but they still get the same allocation with a lower region that is almost semi-arid. I am taken aback to reflect on the formula that we used when passing the County Allocation of Revenue Bill in the Senate. Kericho County is known for good tea production and so many people imagine that it has many natural resources. They forget that half of the part that borders Kisumu and Nandi in the county, which you are very familiar with, is almost an entirely semi-arid region where people live in extremely harsh conditions. I wonder why Kericho County is not amongst the 14 counties that we give the Equalisation Fund because some residents in those parts of the county live in extremely harsh conditions. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, these statistics will help us in decision-making with regard to resources that are directed to the counties. We should appreciate that all counties are not the same. It will also be possible for a Senator to be supplied with information on how many of the county residents still live in grass-thatched houses, how many have access to clean piped water and how many are able to pay school fees for their children without much hustle because the statistics will be readily available. ‘One size fits all’ is a lazy management practice. Unfortunately, that is the kind of management practice that we have embraced at the national Government and sadly, this kind of inefficiency has been passed on to the county governments as well. Where we imagine that when you want to build Early Childhood Development Education (ECDE) classrooms, what you need to do is to say let us divide it by the number of sub counties. If you want to build 500 classrooms, you say we divide it and make a decision. That is so unfortunate. It cannot be that young children who come from one part of a county which is hilly and has poor road network connection because the common standard is that in every sub county, a certain amount of ECDE classrooms are going to be put up and yet in certain parts of the county, such facilities were already in existence. We have been told that equality is a must and it is fair. This is a well thought- out idea where we will be able to distinguish between equity and fairness. Those are two distinct words that our policymakers have never sat down to analyze. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, there are cultural practices that are retrogressive and can only be challenged with statistics. I want to give you a practical example where your land is a diminishing resource across the country. This is a standard practice across the country where you have a patriarch in the family who had a certain size of land and sons have come to subdivide the land among themselves, and the more you subdivide useful agricultural land, the less the value of that land. If you have to inform these residents and give them ideas; that instead of each one of them going to live in a certain corner of the land, they all put up a homestead in one corner of the productive agricultural land use, and the rest is reserved for agriculture, they will need good statistics to challenge them. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I come from a tea growing county and I know tea growing for the small scale farmers has become a torturous exercise. If we had good statistics that had informed the citizens in advance for them to know that if you have 10 acres that was let by the patriarch of the family, instead of sub-dividing such that 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"
}