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{
    "id": 777141,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/777141/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 102,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "The Senate Minority Leader",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": " Mr. Speaker, Sir, the distinguished nominated Senator thinks he can derail me, but he will fail. Let me carry on. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I was on the point about county debts. We have been told that county debts now stand at over Kshs 90 billion. The Controller of Budget appeared before our Committee. I have a lot respect for the distinguished lady; she was my year- mate at the University of Nairobi. But she did not give us any evidence; she just made callous statements like ‘some are fictitious, some are imagined, some are not debts’ and so on, and so forth. She left our Committee without any empirical evidence that some of these debts are fictitious or are not real other than a statement she made to the Committee. Be that as it may, even if the public debt now being owed to Kenyans by the counties stood as little as Kshs 30 billion and not the Kshs 95 billion we are talking about; that is still a worrisome situation. Why? Because the people who are trading in goods and services with the counties are the ordinary Kenyans who are now being bankrupted by banks for not being paid. These are people we represent. There are young men and women in their categories who are struggling traders in the village; who go and kneel before bank managers to borrow as little as Kshs 30,000 to service a Local Purchase Order (LPO) from the county. Yet, three years down the line, they have not been paid. Interest alone eats away everything and they are on the highway to bankruptcy. This is devolution gone wild. Until and unless the national Government sits down with the county governments and comes up with a Marshall Plan--- As a matter of fact, the Public Finance Management Act is very clear that you cannot procure goods or services unless you have a budget line and money to pay for it. So, where has the Kshs 95 billion gone to? What has happened to the institutions of governance in this country? The Office of the Auditor- General, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) are not doing enough. Everybody is sleeping on the job because those governors who have procured services knowing they have no budget line nor money and are sending Kenyans to bankruptcy, have committed economic crimes against the people of Kenya. A remedial step must be taken to arrest this situation. When I say this, some of my colleagues start behaving as if they are being electrocuted. We are not talking about their money; this is the money of the people of Kenya. We must speak for the ordinary man and woman on the streets of Nairobi. 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."
}