Entry Instance

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

{
    "id": 810672,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/810672/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 220,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kipkelion East, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Joseph Limo",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1915,
        "legal_name": "Joseph Kirui Limo",
        "slug": "joseph-kirui-limo"
    },
    "content": "way, to bring a pension scheme to the county governments. This particular one before the National Assembly today, is a Government Bill sponsored by the Leader of the Majority Party, Hon. Aden Duale. We also have another one called the County Pension Scheme Bill 2017 sponsored by Hon. Njagagua which is before this House in the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning. The other one is in the Senate and it is sponsored by Hon. Sakaja. You can therefore see the kind of positive attempts in place to bring a scheme to the county governments that they can call their own. As we contribute, I want to encourage Members that we do so bearing in mind that this Bill is going to build a pension scheme which the county governments will be proud of. In the Second Reading, we are going to dwell on the particular proposals in the Bill and the various views given by the stakeholders which are captured in the Report of the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning which is readily available. At the same time, you will also find that there are obvious clauses in this Bill which are not very good as pointed out by some of the Members. As the Leader of the Majority Party mentioned, we are also proposing some amendments which will make it workable and reasonable. Most of these amendments were received from the stakeholders. I want to bring to the attention of the House that this particular Bill was forwarded to our committee in April and we conducted public participation. We received a total of 17 memoranda from different stakeholders. We went ahead and engaged the stakeholders. We had a retreat where they appeared before us with various views which were going to have an impact of improving the Bill. Among the stakeholders who appeared before us are the Local Authorities Provident Fund which is popularly known as LAPFUND, the County Pensioners Association, the County Pension Funds Financial Services Limited, the Clinical Nursing Society of Kenya, the County Public Service Boards who are calling themselves the National Consultative Forum, the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), the County Government Workers Union, the Kenya National Union of Nurses, the popular Hon. Joe Donde - you know he is very popular especially in the capping of interest rates - Mr. John Bii who was representing the nurses union, the MCAs of Nairobi, the Former Councillors Association, the Union of Kenya Civil Servants, the State Corporation Advisory Committee, and the Council of Governors. All these stakeholders came with a raft of proposals. Some of them were in support of the Bill. Some were not in support of the Bill in full but they were recommending some amendments to make it better. The Committee also engaged the National Treasury accompanied by the Retirement Benefits Authority (RBA). In consideration of this Bill, we took into account the views of these particular stakeholders. As the Leader of the Majority Party went through the Bill, there were several clauses which you may find are not appealing in your view, but in our report you will find various amendments which we will take care in the Committee of the whole House. Of course, Members are also at liberty to come up with amendments which will make this Bill better. In the current dispensation of devolution, county governments have inherited previous pension schemes which were operating during the time of county councils. To bring Members to speed so that you will not assume that maybe the county governments entirely do not have a pension scheme, I want to explain that in the previous dispensation of county councils, we used to have two schemes: LAPFUND, which was designed through an Act of Parliament for the purpose of taking care of employee who were working on contract terms, and then there is another fund which is called LAPTRUST, which was formed through a Gazette Notice by the then Ministry of Local Government. This particular scheme was for the employees who were 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."
}