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"id": 785655,
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"speaker_name": "Hon. Gikaria",
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"legal_name": "David Gikaria",
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"content": "Thank you, Hon. Speaker, for giving me this opportunity. Yesterday, in our Liaison Committee meeting - and we want to thank your deputy because he has really revived the Committee - we were discussing the chairman’s manual. No chair will be deciding what to do in a committee. There will be a manual to direct you on how to conduct your meetings and all issues. He is a very aggressive chairperson and he is doing great. Yesterday, it was brought to our attention that most Members who are chairs are no longer seated here. The advice that we were given is that, even if you are not there, you can ask your Vice-Chair or any other Member to stand in for you. I totally agree with your sentiments that we need to be responsible chairs. If you know you are not available, make sure that somebody is standing in for you so that they can take note of any matter that arises. Secondly, I am an amateur in this field. But I take this opportunity to thank Hon. Osotsi and Hon. Musimba for the professional way in which they have looked at the Bill. When I got it, I just read the memorandum. So, when I was listening to Hon. Musimba, I realized how shallow my contributions are going to be on this Bill based on what the experts have said about it. It is important they have brought up some very pertinent issues regarding this matter. I was just thinking it is about people abusing others on social media or somebody saying a certain issue on incitement. But I have come to realize how critical this Bill is. Just the other day at the Kenyatta National Hospital, where there was a mix-up of patients, you can be diagnosed and be treated for a different disease that you are not suffering from just because somebody has interfered with your medical record on a computer. So, this is a huge Bill that we need to give a lot of concentration and thought because of the magnitude of the issues. The financial loss, for example, that Hon. Musimba was talking about… Just with a stroke of a button, billions of shillings in a year can be lost. So, this is a very serious Bill, not only about our personal issues, and we really need to look at it with a lot of concentration. On matters of election, it is now that I realize about the servers during the August 8 elections. Somebody somewhere having or not having interfered with the process of a computer took us back to another election that may not have been there if the system had been allowed to run. And, maybe, the results would have been better than the way they came out. This is something that we really need to look at in this Bill. On matters to do with government to government, it is very true that governments might be able to interfere. Just the other day after the US elections, Russia was accused of having manipulated the computer system of the US elections. This calls for depth in terms of the way we look at this Bill. International co-operation is very important especially when we are fighting cybercrime. Sometimes, this could be coming from beyond our borders and, therefore, we need international co-operation as indicated in the Bill for us to be able to address some of the crimes that are committed. At the same time, this Bill should not exonerate even the few shillings that are being stolen from a consumer of a service. These days, even if you want to buy tokens for water or electricity at home, it is online. This Bill should not exonerate those people who will be stealing, say, Kshs5 or 10 from a transaction. Of course, such transactions run into millions of transactions and when you compute that, then ordinary Kenyans are losing so much through cybercrime just because somebody has sat somewhere and tried to manipulate the systems. 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."
}