Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 800781,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/800781/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 341,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "that many of the county assemblies that have been in this phase continue to do their work despite the continuous challenges. I know of experiences in my county; if the county government has given a pending bill statement of about Kshs1 billion, when Members of County Assembly (MCAs) sit and take the County Executive Committee members (CECs), department by department and tell them, you are the CEC in charge of transport, for example, you are claiming that there are pending bills of Kshs200 million, please show us the roads done. In that room you have MCAs from each and every part of the county. They cannot cheat. That bill of Kshs200 million instantly reduces from Kshs200 million to maybe Kshs20 million or Kshs30 million. That is the kind of support that we are saying needs to be given to our county assemblies. When we are structuring this KUSP, if we do not incorporate this, I do not see how next year I will support the inclusion of this programme in our budget because this is not free money. We will pay for it at the end of the day. Therefore, if you are not assured that it will give us value for money, there is no need to support this project. There are many things that we would wish to be considered, for instance, the issue of distribution of Level Five Hospitals. We had a good presentation from the Commission for Revenue Allocation (CRA) and one of the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) about the real time challenges that our hospital institutions continue to face. One of the challenges is that we do not funds and we have not set any programme to fund hospitals that otherwise do government functions either because they are mission hospitals or they are owned by charity organisations. Therefore, since we are government, there is nothing that we can lend them yet it is extremely important. It would even be prudent because they manage their resources way better than some of our hospitals. And we must provide the framework. Tenwek Mission Hospital, in Bomet County, for example, serves almost the entire South Rift region in ophthalmology issues and open heart surgery. Everybody troops to this hospital. They are overstretched. They are doing work that would have otherwise been done by the Government but we have not been able to give them a framework of support. You cannot gainsay the amount of work that Kijabe Mission Hospital continues to do in this country yet the Government does not consider to do or give any kind of aid and support to such institutions in terms of health. We need to rethink and think creatively about the shared institutions between counties. A practical example is counties that border each other where hospitals services are strained. I have witnessed and even intervened in disputes where residents of neighbouring counties are telling each other, please show me your Identification Card; to be allowed to access services. If you come from the neighbouring county, you will have to wait until residents of the home county have been served first so that you can be attended to. This is more so because by 10 or 11 O’clock, you are told that the doctor has run short of surgical equipment et cetera. People begin to complain and check each other on these queues and say, those that are from the neighbouring county have to wait because this is not their hospital. We must provide a framework for these Level Five hospitals that have that kind of strain. 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."
}