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{
    "id": 718542,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/718542/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 230,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Manje",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1669,
        "legal_name": "Joseph Wathigo Manje",
        "slug": "joseph-wathigo-manje"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, for giving me this chance to contribute to this Bill. I normally support anything that contributes to the efficiency of corporate bodies, especially parastatals because I know this is where we lose a lot of money as a country and where we have a lot of corruption going on. It is good to understand these parastatals and the main objective behind them. Why a parastatal is created in a country is, for example, to offer services that private enterprises will not do, like the healthcare of our people maybe in the remote areas. That way, a parastatal can be created to venture into that area. Education or transport is another example where a private organisation will not feature very well because of the profit. So, that is one of the cardinal rules that a parastatal is not necessarily driven by the profits but the service to the people of a state. The other purpose of creating a parastatal is to make sure that we do not have natural monopolies. For example, you can have an enterprise that has a pure monopoly and sets high prices for commodities. In that case, you can put a parastatal to compete with it and reduce the price if the Government cannot regulate directly. When I say that these are the cardinal rules, the question we should be asking ourselves is why we have parastatals that are not serving this purpose. For example, why should we have a parastatal like Uchumi which is purely business and the Government has no role in doing business? Why should we have a parastatal like the Bomas of Kenya while we have other enterprises that can do very well in business? We have parastatals like Kenya Utalii College and Kenya Wine Agencies. We want to reduce alcoholism in this country yet our Government has parastatals that are doing business in that line. We should rethink and see which kind of parastatals to retain in this country as we proceed. If you take a parastatal like Kenya Meat Commission (KMC), a Government doing a butchery business, can it do better butchery business than businessmen? We should sit down and come up with parastatals that should be dealt with almost immediately so that we can have efficiency. We have so many organisations. Remember these are created from the taxpayers’ money. You get taxes from well- doing businesses then you invest in meat business. That is not logical at all. So, we should know the cardinal rule and know why we should have these parastatals. Having said that, it is also good to give people who have been doing this privatisation a chance. If somebody is capable, he can be given another chance maybe as a commissioner to continue because three years is quite a short period of time and that is the time you get experience. So, if somebody gets a second term, that would be better. Also those who are doing privatisation, it is good to know that these parastatals have been created with public money. So, it should not be directed towards a small group of people because some of them have been built from the time of our Independence up to now. So, we cannot now take those public assets and give them to a few individuals. That is why we should put amendments in this Bill so that we do not have any shortcut to transfer these parastatals to individuals. Having said that, we should also note that privatisation is not a new thing in the world. Other countries did that. Like in 1980 or 1990, the United Kingdom privatised the British Petroleum which is a big company, the British Airways, electricity companies and gas companies because the British Government noted that these bodies were very inefficient because The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}