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{
    "id": 811967,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/811967/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 57,
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    "content": "When a Bill or a finance document is drafted in English and it is taken to a ward somewhere in Isiolo or Mtito Andei in Makueni and then you proceed to do public participation, is that public participation, really? If you cannot communicate to the public on what you are doing, is that public participation? When we go to the communities, do we go with translators? and do we give them information? Counties are spending billions of shillings conducting what they call public participation which in my view is public relations because they go and request for information. Members of the public are called and they give information but when assemblies go back to debate on the budgets, the public is never told the decisions made. Why is Makueni doing well? Let me tell you the secret. We have 3,612 village committees which determine what projects will be done and they prepare documents. When the village meets, the documents cascade all the way to the ward, the constituency and finally to what we call Makueni People’s Assembly. Those documents are presented to the Governor by the people of those committees. He signs against them and commits himself to those projects. Counties have not formed village committees as we speak. The County of Nyamira was before the Committee on Justice, Legal Affairs and Human Rights and they do not have village administrators, forget about village councils. How then do you say that you have done public participation? The Bill crafted by Sen. Kang’ata aroused a lot of emotion in Mombasa. The bulk of the content in that Bill is what proper public participation is. Who do you consult, how do you prioritise and how do you give the information? If the framework on public participation was in law today, the Bill by Sen. Kang’ata would not be necessary because wards would have the information and they would have determined what their priority projects would be and allocate in the budgets the amount of money required to ensure that every ward is developed. So, this Bill is in simple terms a short Bill but what is not said is so much and voluminous because the framework we have in Makueni cannot be the same framework in Lamu. In Makueni, we can access every village. In Lamu, they use boats. In Isiolo they possibly use camels or donkeys or any other mode of transportation. They may be having any other form of communication. I would not be surprised if there are people who blow horns like they used to do in the olden times. So this framework is only giving general guidelines on what public participation is. My dear colleague Senators, the most important part is not even the beginning but the Schedule which is about general public participation guidelines. When you call people for public participation, you must tell them the purpose and there must be the level required for public participation. When you call people and there are only 10 of them, is that public participation? Questions to be asked are; what is the urgency of the matter? What is the number of people who are affected? Who is targeted? How do you communicate? If you are targeting a village in my county Makueni, do you put adverts in the Daily Nation ? That is the framework that we have under Section 90 in the County Governments Act. I have suggested to this Senate that one of the things that we must do is to have notice boards. If the community where you come from speaks pure Maasai, why write a 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."
}