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"id": 73357,
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"content": "the membership is spread thinly. I think they owned it up and I just want the House to take some lessons from this. Hon. Members of the PAC should be vetted properly for purposes of integrity. Two, we should think of giving them some special terms so that they can dedicate more of their time to this so that they are not even put into so many other Committees because this is really the crux of the matter of Parliament – to play that watchdog role – which we do through these investigatory Committees. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this particular Report has looked at issues of Anglo Leasing promissory notes. There is also the issue of the debt and I will just cover those two. On the Anglo Leasing, when this matter came up, we sat in the Committee under the able chairmanship of Omingo Magara and we instituted a special audit. This is a trend that Dr. Khalwale has continued and sometimes, people do not seem to understand that the PAC has actually the power to do special audits on any matter that is emerging and needs to be sorted out so that we do not wait four to five years down the road to deal with dead matters again. We instituted a special audit on Anglo Leasing and Ministers came before us, gave us those promissory notes and said: “We have cancelled them.” They made those arguments to a Committee of the House that they had cancelled the promissory notes. That the Kenya Government is not going to lose anything and, indeed, we were even convinced that some money had been wired back to the country. But what the PAC Report now is detailing is that the Kenya Government is paying those promissory notes. At that time, we told them: “How do you say you cannot pay a promissory note, unless you go challenging them in court?” A promissory note is basically a debt; it is a first charge and when it is due, it is your obligation to pay. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this Committee should go beyond just making those kind of statements. They should name the people responsible and they should penalize them for misleading the House and the nation. The second issue is about debt. The Chairman of the Budget Committee, hon. Mbau, has said that we have a Kshs1.2 trillion debt. We have 40 million debt, including children and we are adding about 1 million every year. At the rate at which, of course, we are getting a bit older, we are not dying as many as the new born ones. So, if you divide Kshs1.2 trillion – which is Kshs1, 200 billion – by 40 million, you are talking of a debt to every person of about Kshs30, 000. This is what we are giving to our future generations; to the third and fourth generation. It is like a curse. The Bible says: “If you mess with these Ten Commandments, we will curse you to the third and fourth generation.” That is what we are doing as a nation. Sometimes, you do not know what these loans were for. Obviously, we know that they are coming through Anglo Leasing or they may be coming through Goldenberg. It is a shame that we are burdening our progeny because we are not getting it right. Even in this House, we know those Government guarantees and all that. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we should take advantage of the fact that we have already reports of the House that have catalogued and quantified the amounts of money that is going to debt that we should not allow. Even the last time, we were being asked to extend the facility of the Government to borrow; we should deny the Government this excessive borrowing. Any borrowing can only be prudent, to the extent that it is serving a particular public good and public service that, actually, can be determined by the House, because this is the House of the representatives of the people. I have been wondering why the Kenya Government has been reluctant even to benefit from the highly indebted countries facility by the World Bank. Granted, we seem to be managing and it is good to see that we are managing. But when we have"
}