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{
    "id": 783225,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/783225/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 57,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Ng’ongo",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 110,
        "legal_name": "John Mbadi Ng'ong'o",
        "slug": "john-mbadi"
    },
    "content": "He said, “We have trained 10,000 police officers. It does not matter if 1,400 resign.” That kind of attitude is not good. How do you expect the police officers to be motivated to do their work when they watch television and see their boss speak like that? I will move to the issue of salaries that has been talked about. If someone has been awarded a salary, there is no way you can reduce that person’s salary under the excuse that he was wrongly awarded. The person has been paid that salary for some period of time! What is the problem? If someone awarded the salary wrongly, it is that person who should be shown the door first. We need to see this Kenyan who awarded the police officers salaries illegally. By the way, if you are recruiting a graduate into the police force… We encourage that our police service should even have more graduates because we want intelligence also. The police service is not just about carrying a gun and shooting. That is why sometimes they make mistakes. We also need some level of intellect. We need these people to be intelligent. They were put in some grade earning them about Kshs36,000. Imagine waking up one morning to be told that all this time your salary has been wrongly awarded and that it is being reduced from Kshs36,000 to Kshs18,000. After that, you see the chairman of the NPC talking on television like a very ignorant person – more ignorant than an ordinary Kenyan in the street – saying no salary has been reduced only for the police spokesman, on the same day, to appear on another television station saying, “We have reduced the salary because it was wrongly awarded.” Now between the chairman of the NPC and the spokesman of the police, who is telling Kenyans the truth? We must stop this. This bad habit of reducing people’s salary has been brought to this country by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC). I know when it affects Members of Parliament every Kenyan claps and hails it. Even if you are my enemy, you cannot have your salary reduced. Once you are given that salary, the best that can happen is to maintain it at that point for a period of time in order to allow harmonisation to take place. Therefore, you cannot give someone a salary and reduce it. Then you get another excuse that there are some people who are now being subjected to tax when the law is very clear that any Kenyan who is disabled, including a Member of Parliament, is not supposed to be subjected to taxation. Now you start taxing police officers who are disabled because there is some corruption within the system. You even start taxing people who are genuinely physically disabled! Why don’t you continue paying as you investigate? Investigation and paying are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you ask yourself, “What is wrong with the top leadership of our police service?” In fact, the top leadership of the police service needs to be retrained. We need to retrain them. We expected the NPC to vet them. They carried out some exercise purporting to be vetting of police officers, but I am not sure whether they did a good job. The Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) started very well but along the way, I do not know what has hit them. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, allow me to say two more things regarding the specifics of this Motion and those police officers who are deployed in hardship and risky areas. By the way, most of the police officers we take to these areas are the most inexperienced; those who have just come from college. Sometimes you ask yourself whether we take our sons and daughters to go and die. This is because you take them there with very limited experience. Why don’t you take people who are more experienced to these risky areas? Above all, when you take these police offices to those areas, one thing that you must do is you must motivate them. I know you cannot pay life. No one can pay life but there is need for proper insurance cover, especially for police officers who are being deployed to these risky areas. We need a separate insurance cover for the officers who are deployed to those areas. During the period they are deployed to The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}