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{
    "id": 823128,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/823128/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 316,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Bondo, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Gideon Ochanda",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1264,
        "legal_name": "Gideon Ochanda Ogolla",
        "slug": "gideon-ochanda-ogolla"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. The Committee has done well in terms of the Report and on issues of benchmarking. There is quite a lot that they must have brought in. I wanted to bring to the attention of the Committee and the PSC, as we go through this, that there are many things that are still missing. Some could be learnt from countries that are much lower than Kenya and others could be learnt from higher countries or democracies where parliaments work much better than we do. One thing that I realised when we visited Dodoma in neighbouring Tanzania is that Parliament has a good health facility within its precincts. There is a good facility that handles basic health issues. We are talking of a Level 1 or Level 2 hospital within the precincts of Parliament that can handle issues of testing malaria, blood pressure and little tests like some of the ones Dr. Nyikal mentioned. They are done within the precincts of Parliament and it works. There is a population of over 1,500 staff in Parliament in both the Senate and National Assembly. If you add that to the total number of Members of Parliament at 400 plus, you realise that we have a very big population. You can compare that to a small secondary school with 300 students having its own little clinic within the school compound. It is high time the Committee looked at this. We need to have a basic healthcare facility. It does not have to be very sophisticated. The one in Dodoma looks sophisticated. People need to be sent there to get this information in under two hours. It is working and is very good. In Nairobi, if you feel your temperature rising and you are in the House, you have to run to Nairobi Hospital or the Aga Khan Hospital. You waste a lot of time now that we know how traffic in Nairobi looks like. It will save this Parliament a lot. Looking at the amounts of money we pay to insurance companies to cover some of those little things, if we had a facility within the precincts of Parliament, on one hand, we would save in terms of cost and the resources that go into it. On the other hand, we will save time because there would be a facility that you can quickly access. Third, we will count ourselves as more complete as a House in terms of how our health is looked at. The other thing that the Committee and the PSC needs to look at is the issue of support to Members. The role of a Member of Parliament, particularly in terms of oversight, requires some serious data research backup. When we are debating in Parliament, like we are currently doing, without proper information, at the end of the day, either we are making noise or coming up with things that do not make sense because we are not properly backed up. There was a petition today on issues of boreholes. I was in a meeting the other day and it was said that in Nairobi alone, for example, there are 2,000 boreholes. When talking about issues of water in Nairobi, you will have the data. You will know that there are boreholes and piped water in terms of what comes from the Ndakaini Dam and from Ngong. There is proper backed-up information. That is exactly what we are lacking in this Parliament. I know we have researchers. The Budget Office has very good support staff in terms of analysts. They are analysts. They are not researchers. In Parliament, there are close to 30 or so researchers. In real sense, there are more analysts than researchers. They do not handle primary data research issues. For the researchers to be meaningful to this Parliament or to Members, they 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."
}