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{
    "id": 835914,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/835914/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 208,
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    "content": "government will meet the medical costs of those who have been admitted in various hospitals in his county. This is the spirit we want to embrace. This country has had many such accidents. Every time we have an accident, we have a lot of knee-jerk reactions, for example, stopping night travels. However, after a short while, everybody forgets. For example, I have heard the Inspector-General of Police directing that the owner of the bus should be arrested and charged for allowing the bus to be driven at night. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I have carefully looked at the law, which I know very well, and there is no offence known as ‘driving a bus at night.’ Therefore, I do not know what he wants to do by making such declarations. What we must fight is recklessness on our roads by ill-trained, ill-equipped and ill-prepared drivers and corruption by police, who constantly collect money from errant drivers and let them pass through road blocks, even when they are evidently wrong. Above all, we must enforce the rules of the passenger numbers in buses. I am told that this bus had a passenger capacity of 55. However, already 58 are dead and many more are in hospitals. This means that it was grossly overloaded and probably driven very badly. It may be possible that the driver of this bus drove it in the morning from Kakamega to Nairobi and was driving back to Kakamega in the night. That means that he was fatigued. We need to go back to the good old days when we were growing up, coming to Nairobi. The bus used to leave Bungoma and it had a timetable. A driver would enter the time he leaves Bungoma. If he reached Eldoret ahead of his time, there was a prima facie evidence of reckless driving and over speeding. He was arrested and charged. Those rules must be brought back if we have to save Kenyans. Telling our drivers not to drive at night is a contradiction because we want to run a 24-hour economy. How do we run a run a 24-hour economy if we restrict drivers from driving and yet our people want to work and do business at night? People work 24-hours in many places. They come to Nairobi to work and travel back to their destinations in the night and start working again the following day. I want to urge the Committee on Roads and Transportation in this House to also make a point of looking at this grisly accident and other recent accidents we have seen in Naivasha, Sachangwan and many other places and see how we can better the state of safety on our roads. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to take this opportunity to send my heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of all those who perished in this accident. I also urge the national Government to step in and support the efforts started by the Governor of Kericho by undertaking the costs of treatment and burial processes of the accident victims."
}