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{
    "id": 814957,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/814957/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 102,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, what will this board or commission with big titles and salaries do to reach everybody in every corner of this country? Will they identify small streams that can be used for successful irrigation schemes? The solution to storing rain water is not the big gigantic dams. Let us have machineries which we used to have in the former Ministry of Agriculture everywhere in this country. A farmer, for example, could hire the equipment at a reasonable price and go to his farm identify one or two sites and a dam was dug for proper irrigation. The concept of this Bill and its formulation is not well thought. It needs to be relooked again because we have a certain amount of resources which we need to utilise in the best way possible. When we were talking about devolution in this country, we had proposed ten regions. We had said that they should be the old provinces. We had proposed that the Rift Valley and Eastern Provinces should each be divided into two provinces because of their sizes. That way, we would have ended up with ten regions. That decision was made one evening, but when we met the following day, it was thrown away because of other tribal decisions that were to be taken. We then proposed to have the old districts and maintain the six which the former President, Mzee Moi had created and that is how we came up with 47 counties. These counties are top-heavy, such that some of them are spending 80 per cent of their resources on overheads, maintenance and redundant personnel. This is not the way to build this country! Therefore, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I do not think that the way this Bill is formulated is the way to go. It needs to be sent back to the drafters and those who formulated it, for them to rethink it and go back to the history of this country. We need to retrace our history. Today, in the United States of America (USA), you will hear people quoting former Presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Therefore, we must retrace our history because we had very clear ways in which we wanted this country to run. For heaven sake, let us retrace these footsteps because the departments which were created earlier worked very well. I beg that passing this Bill will be nothing more than adding another load to a horse that is already too tired and is struggling to walk. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir."
}