HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"id": 736898,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/736898/?format=api",
"text_counter": 83,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Hon. Ochieng",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 2955,
"legal_name": "David Ouma Ochieng'",
"slug": "david-ouma-ochieng"
},
"content": "Thank you, Hon. Speaker. I rise to support this very important Bill which is late. Devolution is now a constant feature of our country. It is going to be with us for the longest time, in my opinion. Therefore, the way we midwife and the way we ensure that it works well, the better. Some of the most important functions of the Government have been devolved. We devolved health, water, agriculture, sports and some of the very basic social services that any Government would want to provide. Therefore, the passing and the working of this Bill should be done in a timely manner but, above all, it should be done through the agreement between the two Houses. I fail to understand why we cannot have informal meetings early enough every year between the relevant bodies of this National Assembly and the Senate so that we do not have to keep on going back and forth every year with disagreements to mediate. Sometimes, it makes good sense if we can agree early. All of us agree that devolution is the best thing that has happened in this country. But why do you have to haggle every year with the issue of dividing revenue as required by the law? Four years down the lane, we must now have a better formula and working relationship between ourselves and the Senate, to ensure that these kinds of Bills do not have to be antagonistic. We do not have to be going to Senate and back to National Assembly every year just because we agreed on how much should go where. The reason we do it first of all is because resources are scarce. We do not have all the money on earth. If you are going to do it every year, it means that we have not understood why we wanted devolution. Without going into the amounts that have been allocated, I believe what is required at the base is an understanding why we devolved those services and what the governors need to do. At the end of the day, we have only one national Government - the Government of Kenya - that has the interest of the success of everyone, including those county governments. That is why when I see so much money being given down to the governors conditionally without proper checks and balances, I wonder what the Senate is doing. If every year you give county governments monies for hospitals to help them run the health portfolio, then you must set benchmarks. We must agree that in every dispensary we have the following services being provided. We cannot have each governor having his own benchmarks on what a dispensary, health centre or hospital should look like. We should have benchmarks early enough. So, if we are going to use money to build hospitals and dispensaries, we must know what a basic dispensary should have in this country. So, you do not have Isiolo having the best services in one dispensary and Siaya having different services in the similar dispensary. We need to have benchmarks. This is the role I thought the Senate should play; that once we send the monies down there, their role should not end up at calling governors. They should set benchmarks that for water services, this is what you expect the county government to provide. We should have a uniform and clear message that every county governor will have to follow this modicum in terms of coming up with water projects. When it comes to agriculture, it is the same thing. We expect that when we devolve money in agriculture, this is the basic minimum we expect from every governor. This is because, currently, everyone does their own things the way they like. For me, this is a failure of the Senate. In my opinion, the Senate has not come up with any law that will guide the county governments on what to do. Hon. Speaker, the reason you hear a lot of noise down there that there is no so much money is because we basically replicated the whole structure as it is in the national Government to the county governments. We have the governor, the deputy governor, people called the County Executive Committee (CEC) who are basically ministers, then you have a few officers 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."
}