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{
    "id": 742817,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/742817/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 207,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Gikaria",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2489,
        "legal_name": "David Gikaria",
        "slug": "david-gikaria"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Hon. Speaker, for giving an opportunity to support the 21st Report of the PIC. It is a little bit unfortunate because when the Mover and the Seconder were debating they lamented about a few issues. I thought it was important for them to have given proper recommendations. I belong to the Committee on Implementation and after this Report has been adopted by the House, it will come to our Committee so that we can start following up the recommendations. Some of these recommendations need to be precise and point to specific individuals so that action is taken. I appreciate the good work that has been done by the Chair, Hon. Keynan and his team. It talks volumes regarding State Corporations. This country needs to reduce the number of State Corporations and privatise some of them. It is sad that every time we want to privatise some of them there is a lot of politics and we continue pumping in huge sums of money from the public coffers and at the end they go down the drain and do not fulfill the purposes they were meant to. We have seen success in a few of the corporations which were privatised. It is high time that this country started looking at each corporation on a case by case basis so that we analyse them. There was a report on the privatisation of some State corporations. I say this because we have a few within our jurisdiction. This Government has continued to pump a lot of money into some of these corporations without success. They keep coming back wanting more money. A case in point is the Tana and Athi Rivers Development Authority (TARDA). As a Committee, we visited the place after a community petitioned Parliament regarding the overflow of the dams. When we checked what TARDA requested, we found that to date, it has never been given the mobilisation to clear the issues that the Committee recommended. That notwithstanding, I want to start by talking about the prior years’ audit queries. As recommended by the Committee, it is important that prior audit queries which have been exhaustively addressed by the Committee need not--- As an accountant, those are international accounting standards. You make an audit look as if it is so huge yet some of those things have been addressed by this Committee. It is important for the Auditor-General to follow the recommendations which have been given by the Committee. According to the Report on page 9, you had a meeting with the Auditor-General where you agreed that some of those things need not recur in every other financial year. Those are prudent and important international accounting standards. At the same time, those queries need to be exhaustively addressed by the relevant authority so that we do not just have an Auditor-General who just audits and makes queries and then they are not acted upon. It is important for the respective Government agencies which are supposed to undertake the recommendation of the Auditor-General to take their work seriously so that we do not have this. The other issue regards the non-remittance of statutory deductions. It is very sad that workers are deducted those statutory deductions from their monthly pay slips for a long time yet there is no remittance. At the end of the day, if the recoveries of the NSSF and the NHIF are not done on time and remitted to the respective institutions, it means that if a Kenyan got sick and his NHIF remittance is not remitted--- Those are some of the issues. We will take seriously the recommendations of the Committee on Implementation that the respective accounting officers in various State corporations be held to account for getting money yet those monies are already in the budgets. They get the money; deduct them from the salaries of the workers and they do not remit it. At the end of the day, it is the same worker who ends up going back to his or her pockets to try and solve some of those issues. 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."
}