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{
    "id": 729972,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/729972/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 241,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Ochieng",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2955,
        "legal_name": "David Ouma Ochieng'",
        "slug": "david-ouma-ochieng"
    },
    "content": "Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I like his choice of words. It is, indeed, wrong for the President to switch on lights in a rundown house. It is, in fact, a shame. What if that house falls down tomorrow? You rightly said “rundown”. You cannot support that as a Member of Parliament. Hon. Ababu has presented a Bill on rural housing before this House. I hope we will pass it before the end of this Parliament. You must do sequencing. It is very important to know which one comes first, second and third. The first thing is to help somebody to get, at least, a semi-permanent house and then think about supplying that house with electricity. Even in budgeting, sequencing is very important. Which one comes first? You are building a railway using half a trillion shillings. Which is the best thing? Is it setting up an industry in Kenya to reproduce bolts and nuts or importing them from China? Sequencing is very important. In everything we do, we should be creating jobs for our young people. We should invest in development of local industries. We should do sequencing in terms of building the capacity of local contractors to build roads. That is what we should be doing. That is how we create jobs. That is how the economy grows. It rarely grows by throwing good money. The economy rarely grows by hoping that if you launch projects, you will achieve something. You do not do that. Therefore, as we pass the Budget, the most important thing is efficiency. If you budget for Kshs10 and you use it wisely to get what you want, you will achieve your objectives. In Kenya today, a bulb which costs Kshs1,000 in a supermarket is supplied to the Government at Kshs5,000. We are not doing the right thing and yet we allow it every year in our Budget! We do not follow up on the money we allocate. We do not even require Ministries to account. If you ask them to do so, they threaten to remove the Auditor-General. If you ask the Auditor-General, he says, “This has not been done the right way.” It is because we do not intend to do the right thing. Even Members of Parliament, you see us talking to heads of parastatals telling them they have not done well in certain areas. We even ask how we can help them. Instead of sending them to jail, we want to do deals with them. How can oversight happen when you do deals with people you are supposed to oversee? We are killing this country, but we keep doing it because we think the country is ending tomorrow. The country is not coming to an end any soon. In fact, the stealing will continue for the next many years. Even as we pass this Budget, we need to realise that we are in this as a country. There is no Republic of Nyanza, Murang’a or the Rift Valley. This country is called the Republic of Kenya and we must build it together. If you build Murang’a and you do not build Siaya, the country will not grow."
}