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"id": 774286,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/774286/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
"speaker_title": "February 21, 2018 SENATE DEBATES 18 The Senate Minority Leader",
"speaker": {
"id": 210,
"legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
"slug": "moses-wetangula"
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"content": " Thank you, Mr. Speaker, Sir. This is a very strange Bill. I do not know why it is here. I do not know who brought it. It is a total misplacement of priorities. What is a city? What is a municipality? What is a town? The Oxford English dictionary describes a city as a large town –a big human settlement. Period! A municipality is a component of one that I have described. A town is a human settlement with a big cluster. There is no evidence brought here in the Bill or elsewhere, that the cities, towns and municipalities we are talking about, which are based in counties; that there is any contribution from the Council of Governors (CoG) or country representation to define what they want. Whether you are talking of Nairobi or not, it is not in the hands of the national Government. Mombasa and Meru are not in the hands of the national Government. They are all in the hands of county governments that should be the engineers for such a Bill. A Bill like this would be more helpful to this country if it is focused on planning, bringing sanity and order, and provision of services that either can be provided by the private sector or mandatorily provided for by the management of the cities. The Bill is just giving us a litany of issues that they say will qualify a town to be a city. They do not make sense. A population of 500,000 people do not really matter. If you go to the United Kingdom, Cambridge is a city. It is just a university town. At any one time, the population of Cambridge City never goes beyond 50,000 people. It is just students, their teachers and service providers, yet it is a city. If you look at Norwich; it is a city. It does not have even a population of 500,000 people. It is what you want to be called and want to be. As far as I am concerned, Ongata Rongai and Ruiru are cities on the outskirts of Nairobi City. You do not need any legal definition to call it a city. It is what it has grown to be. What we should be doing is to define and obligate the national Government, in collaboration with the country governments; more particularly, given the fact that the bulk of state resources are at the national Government, to support each other in planning and provision of services. Today, if you go in all our counties, the mushrooming urban centres are just growing as slums because there is no planning or industrial area. The planners of this city were great men and women. Today, you go to Industrial Area; an asbestos factory has a residential estate next to it. You go to a factory emitting dangerous fumes and smoke; they have licensed the construction of apartments. Mr. Speaker, Sir, as we were growing up, it was very clear. There was Industrial Area in Nairobi and residential areas. Each residential area had a shopping component and so on so forth. This is what planning is all about. Now you go to some places in Nairobi—there is a place we used to go with some friends called Shauri Moyo that has 23 shops. Sixteen are bars while the remaining are butcheries to service the bars. The place has therefore become a den of iniquity. Nothing else goes on there. Why would anybody license 23 bars in a square kilometre for heaven’s sake? This is what we should be addressing. The ridiculous thing about the Bill is that it says that for you to be called a city or municipality, you must have “water and sanitation.” That is available even in our private The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}