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"content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we must relook on this issues about the questions of what a town is, the population of a town and when to make it a city. This is because you must tell me what the incentive is. If we are going to change it to give a CS the responsibility, then there must be an incentive that counties are going to be given more money based on the more responsibilities they have. Is Kisii Town a town or a municipality? It is a municipality clamouring to be a city. The Senator of Kisii County is here. There are challenges that they deal with there. But with those challenges, there is nothing extra we are giving them from the national Government, for instance, giving them some extra money to manage their urban areas or city or municipality. That is why I have a problem with even the original Bill. The reason why I am very conversant with this is because I was in the task force on devolved government that came up with the original Bill itself. We established what a town or a city is and so on. We did it in terms of categorisation. Looking back, in my opinion, we made a mistake in forcing a management structure to it to provide the number of people that must be in- charge of a municipality or a town. I remember, in the debates of the task force of the devolved government, I kept saying that, for example, if you say Eldoret Town is going to be called a municipality, they must have a mayor or a municipal manager; an independent person running the municipality. But what is Uasin Gishu County without Eldoret Municipality? It is nothing. So, will a governor accept that you establish a management structure of Eldoret Municipality that will have a manager, its own system of collecting taxes and so on? This means he becomes a governor of the rural area. Technically, the governor will be reduced to a governor of a rural area because the town itself would have been taken over by a management structure that has been created by an Act of Parliament. That Act of Parliament is likely to contravene the Constitution itself. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I am just making this contribution because I respect the technical Committee that worked on this Bill. However, we can improve on it. I wish the Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Devolved Government and Intergovernmental Relations was here. Why can we not allow the county governments to be in charge in the sense that we forget the management of the counties and leave it to them to pass county laws that deal with administrative structure of their counties in the manner they want? If you tell people in the county that they must have a municipal manager, ten people and a committee involving so-and-so, you will increase their wage bill and perhaps, it is something that could have been administered by the County Executive Committee (CEC) Member responsible for urban planning in the county. That flexibility must be in-built in this law. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, there was debate in the last Parliament under your leadership that people were clamoring for a municipality or a city in their towns. What is the point of reducing a city to 250,000 people? This Bill reduces the population of a city to 250,000 so that, for example, Nakuru Town should now become a city, then what will follow? Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the same Bill tries to change the population of a municipality to 50,000. If the population of a place reaches 50,000, it becomes a municipality. If this is the case, every constituency in Nairobi will be a municipality 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."
}