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{
    "id": 813152,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/813152/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 151,
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    "content": "national executive can one morning wake up and reclassify the roads and leave the counties with only the roads that go to the cattle dips, as the Senator for Narok has said. This is not in line with Article 96 of the Constitution which has mandated us to protect counties and their governments, bearing in mind that the major infrastructure items are roads. Madam Temporary Speaker, the classification of roads is not okay. I would like to differ with my colleague. She has looked at many things in the Bill that are okay. I am not saying that the Bill is bad in its entirety, but as long as a Bill takes back the gains from counties and does not support devolution and protection of county governments, then I have a problem with that. Madam Temporary Speaker, additionally, Sen. Mwaura has passionately spoken about the quality of our roads and the amount of money that we use to build them. I know for a fact that we are building our roads with very expensive instruments. Multilateral instruments such as the World Bank are usually very reasonable, yet, as a country, we are opting for the very expensive options. This has been said before and I do not wish to belabour it. This Bill will be very expensive to our country, especially if will be implemented through borrowing. As I speak, our ratio of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to our borrowing is pathetic. Our credit rating has been downgraded by Moody's Investors Service, the credit rating agency, and I have brought this discussion to this House before. Our sovereignty, as a country, is at stake because we are not even credit worthy. Based on that, our banks have been downgraded from Credit Rating A to B. In terms of debt financing for some of these roads, there is a lot that needs to be looked at. I would like to concur with the Senator for Narok that many of the Bills that come to this House are very wanting with regard to their protection and support of counties. In fact, in the near future, I will bring a Motion that will look into the issue of due diligence of Bills that come before this House; that take away entrenchment of devolution. I will bring a Motion to propose a committee that will look at our mandate, which is the protection of counties. The protection of counties committee will ensure that there is due diligence on the legislation we make. We have committees on every sector, except for the mandate for which this House exists. Therefore, there is need for very thorough interrogation with regard to classification of roads. The Bill gives too much power to the CS to reclassify roads at the expense of taking away from the counties. Madam Temporary Speaker, I have an issue with the number of authorities that are proposed by this Bill. We already have KeNHA, KURA, KeRRA and so on. Now, we have all manner of authorities being introduced in this Bill. This is very expensive to maintain and they will be based in the national Government and not counties. This means we are taking devolution back and concentrating decision making and power on these authorities that are national by nature. Are we thinking about the expense and the possibility of corruption? As we know, some of these authorities have been known to divert public funds, and I do not want to accuse anybody. Instead of consolidating and making our Ministry for Infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development strong and with the right capacity to do this work, we are creating layers of authorities and parastatals that take away from the development 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."
}