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{
    "id": 771159,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/771159/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 165,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 3036,
        "legal_name": "Timothy Wanyonyi Wetangula",
        "slug": "timothy-wanyonyi-wetangula"
    },
    "content": "I thank you, Hon. Speaker for giving me this chance to contribute to this Bill. I represent an urban constituency. This failure to plan has caused a great deal of a mess in some of the settlement areas where you find people in residential houses have no roads, no sewer lines and many other things. When you look at the old estates that were started in Nairobi, mostly in Eastlands, you realise that they were properly planned. They were done with amenities also being provided. These days developers come up with plans that have no direction. You find houses being built in any direction and now we have crowded areas. If you go to an area like Kileleshwa, it used to be a single House unit, but now we have apartments all over the place. They have caused a lot of stress on the infrastructure in the area. The road, water, and sewer systems are still the same. Fiscal planning must be done with a lot of thought so that it is proper. Hon. Speaker, you have travelled widely and you have seen how cities are planned around the world. You have seen how land is properly utilised by proper planning. In our country, land is so much demarcated that it does not make any economic sense. So, we feel that if we come up with this Bill and land is properly utilised, we shall realise a lot of benefits from our land. As the population grows, land is not expanding. We need to make use of the little land we have. Even within Nairobi, we have seen people coming to build hotels in residential areas and putting up structures that do not match with the initial planning of the area. We have also seen people building bars close to schools. When you look at some of these things comprehensively, it just boils down to planning. They say, when you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. This is what has happened in this country. We have seen it when disaster occurs especially in slum areas in Nairobi: people just stand and watch because despite the distress calls, the fire engines cannot access some of these areas. There are places, where there is a limit on how much land can be demarcated. Sometimes people have reduced that to the very minimal so that it does not make sense that somebody can even construct something in that area. When the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) Government came to power in 2002, the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister Raila Odinga, was the Minister for Lands. He brought down so many structures that are now paving way for the construction of these bypasses. At that time, I am sure most of us did not see the sense in what he was doing, but he had looked at the master plan of Nairobi and he knew that for us to open up Nairobi we needed to construct those roads. That paved the way for the construction of the bypasses that have now eased traffic within the Central Business District (CBD) and many other areas in Nairobi. We must comprehensively look at how we deal with land in Kenya. Not just in urban areas, but even in the rural areas where most of the land is agricultural. Families with small pieces of land end up subdividing them to portions that are of no value to the users. As we look at this Bill at a later stage, we shall come up with amendments. Even the national consultative forum that has been established and its composition, I can see it has looked at many other aspects, including providing for membership for persons from the National Council for Persons with Disability and other professional bodies. I am sure this will bring on board proper guidance on how to utilise our land in the country. Thank you for the chance and I support. 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."
}