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{
    "id": 71124,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/71124/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 334,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "43 Wednesday, 15th December, 2010(P) Mr. Mwaita",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, thank you for giving me this opportunity to contribute to this Motion. First, I would like to join my colleagues by thanking Mr. Kaino and his Committee. When he moved the Motion the other day, he informed the House that they moved all over the country, especially the upper eastern, North Rift and even outside this country. They went to Ethiopia and Botswana. Cattle rustling is a terrible menace and the effects cannot be under-estimated. It causes loss of lives and makes communities maimed, marginalized and impoverished. For example, in my constituency, Baringo Central, Mariga District, there is a community called the “Njemps” who are pastoralists. In the last five years, they have lost over 3,000 heads of cattle, 5,000 goats and over twenty lives lost across the board between them and the Pokots. It is terrible. I am happy that the Committee went round and paid a visit to those communities and they identified the major causes of this menace. My colleagues have talked about cultural and traditional practices but in this time and era, those practices should have been discarded. In certain communities, people steal to get enough animals to pay for dowry but we cannot accept this. It is not acceptable. You steal property of another person to be able to marry. That should stop. They have also given other causes like poverty. These are people who are very poor and the youth, due to lack of jobs, resort to stealing. That is what has become commercialization of our cultural practice where people steal animals from one part of the country and sell it in another part to make money. That should not be allowed because it is causing insecurity among communities. The Committee came up with several recommendations and there is one which I liked. That is, modernizing our way of keeping animals. In the normal branding, there is the idea of using computers and the GPRS where specific chips are inserted into the animal so that they can be tracked wherever they go. That is like the tracking system which is used in vehicles. If that can be introduced, it will be able to curtail this menace so that when animals are moved from Samburu, Turkana, West Pokot and loaded into trucks and moved all the way to Dagoretti to be slaughtered; they can be tracked using the GPRS system. If the Governent can implement that among other recommendation, it will reduce the menace by over 70 per cent. This is because whoever will be stealing an animal in Samburu will know that the animal will be tracked up to Dagoretti. That will reduce this problem. The other recommendation is affirmative action in some of these places and my colleagues have talked about it. Affirmative action in terms of infrastructure, mobile schools, mobile health centres and certain roads should be developed and improved so that they are motorable. These should be all-weather roads so that our security forces can reach those areas with ease. If that can be done by the Government, it will reduce this terrible menace. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the other issue is how we introduce other ways of improving the livelihoods of our people. We should introduce bee-keeping in the arid and semi-arid areas. We could also start honey refineries, so that the harvested honey can be packaged and exported. The people who rely on cattle rustling can then see that there is life outside cattle rearing and stealing. As one Member said earlier, in some of these places, dams can be dug to start micro-irrigation schemes. These schemes will assist the communities to grow food crops"
}