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    "id": 813154,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/813154/?format=api",
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    "content": "budget to recurrent budget. As I speak, over 50 percent of the country’s revenue goes to recurrent budget. Creation of all these authorities will make our recurrent budget balloon even further. Our borrowing and public debt will go out of hand and our grandchildren will pay for this. What is the quality of the roads? Today, a road is made and it develops potholes the next day. Why do we spend so much money to do shoddy roads, yet we have multiple authorities and experts who are supposed to be doing this work? Madam Temporary Speaker, we are here to make laws but we will definitely have issues with some of the provisions of this Bill with regard to classification which entrenches devolution and the cost of implementing this Bill because of the number of authorities and extra layers that it proposes. More importantly, the manner in which this will be put in place does not seem to support devolution. Some of the provisions in the Miscellaneous Amendment, Part 3, give a lot of authority to the national Government. While we agree and know very well that the national Government can make decisions, it does not mean that it is superior to county governments. They are complementary and not necessarily inferior. Therefore, I do not understand why a lot of legislation that comes from the National Assembly tends to be heavy on national institutions instead of being supportive. We need to push resources down to the local decision-making level and to the frontline of implementation, which is the counties. This Bill takes that away. This House should fight tooth and nail to make sure that resources are given to counties. It has been said that counties do not have capacity yet the national Government does not build roads; it is the Chinese contractors that build the roads. It is not the technocrats that sit in the national Government that build the road. Therefore, why can we not have legislation that gives muscle and capacity to county governments so that they are able to supervise these contractors and get into these arrangements? The idea that counties do not have capacity is being abused. There is no national Government technocrat who builds the roads directly; it is the Chinese that build roads and we have a problem with that because they are expensive, there is no technology transfer and the human rights record, as we have seen in the last few days, is pathetic. Madam Temporary Speaker, on all counts, therefore, this Bill needs to be interrogated further by this House. We will also give written memoranda on what needs to change. I also do not support the idea of just passing the Bill as a national Bill. There is nothing that does not have inter-dependencies. Passing this as a national Bill will take responsibility away from counties because it will create a back door from which a parallel system can go on without the knowledge of the counties. Therefore, it is in the interest of counties and of this country for the two arms of Government to work together and not separate for whatever reason. Madam Temporary Speaker, that said, I would like to speak a little bit to the issues of corruption. Everything that comes to this House has to be looked at to make sure that it ticks all the boxes with regard to good governance, in terms of resources and implementation. We have already been told that many roads were done on double budgets and were below optimal in governance and have already fallen apart. These 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."
}