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{
    "id": 721963,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/721963/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 164,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Ms.) Ng'etich",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 511,
        "legal_name": "Cecilia Chelangat Ngetich",
        "slug": "cecilia-chelangat-ngetich"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I will keep on struggling because I am battling with my lost voice. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to contribute to this very important Motion about the National Building Maintenance Policy. There is a famous saying in Swahili that Usipoziba ufa utajenga ukuta . This means that if you do not repair a cracked wall in time, one day it will come down and obviously it will be too expensive to put it up again. Indeed, it is very embarrassing to see the state of most of the public facilities. I want to concur with my colleague, Hon. Millie Odhiambo, that this is really about the apathy or the I-do- not-care attitude amongst us. We tend to look at public facilities as another person’s responsibility and not our own responsibility. This policy has come at the right time. In fact, it ought to have been there a long time back. Whenever we construct buildings, we should know that they should last for a number of years. This is because you cannot keep on constructing new buildings every time. The way to make them last longer is to maintain them. Of course it is very expensive to construct new buildings and that is why we need to prolong the life of existing ones. That way we will avoid the cost of pulling down buildings and constructing new ones. However, we cannot also maintain buildings that were not constructed in the right manner in the first instance. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, it is good that we now have the Engineering, Technologists and Technicians Act, 2016, which regulates the construction industry. We do not want to continue witnessing buildings under construction coming down and killing people. It should start from regulating construction and progress to maintenance. You cannot maintain a building that was not properly constructed in the first place. I want to talk about poor physical planning in Kenya. We have visited countries like the USA, where old buildings belonging to municipal authorities and cities are well planned. There are areas which are specifically set aside for construction of skyscrapers while other areas are for construction of bungalows. They are very appealing. In Kenya, buildings are constructed in haphazard ways to an extent of blocking access ways. When buildings catch fire, it becomes difficult to salvage anything from them due to lack of access roads for use by fire engines to reach the buildings. Sometimes it is even impossible to expand the sewage and water systems. I hope this policy will help in controlling exploitation by landlords. Landlords are nowadays pushing maintenance to tenants by telling them that they should leave their houses as new as they found them when they moved in. I do not think that is in order because the rent collected over time should be used to maintain such premises."
}