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{
    "id": 836914,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/836914/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 241,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kiharu, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Ndindi Nyoro",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13370,
        "legal_name": "Samson Ndindi Nyoro",
        "slug": "samson-ndindi-nyoro"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, for giving me this chance. I rise to support the Report by the Chair of the Committee. I belong to a committee that shares so much with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I am in the Committee on Regional Integration and basically, we do more or less the same thing. We have seen, first-hand information, some of the issues that were raised by the Chairman and even the Seconder of the Report. However infamous and unpopular the person was, what Idd Amin Dada did to the Republic of Uganda was to make sure that Uganda was represented not just by personnel but even by real estate in the places they had presence. I think we can borrow a leaf as a country with regard to that because most of the embassies I have been to are rented. If you are to tabulate the recurrent expenditure of renting these spaces, I think it will be strategic for us as a country to move forward with haste in acquiring some of these properties and have presence in most of the places that we have missions and embassies. I was in Moscow just recently and I can attest to most of the issues that have been raised. First of all, even the location itself… This is because the physical address of an embassy talks a lot about the importance that we give them. The embassy is the equivalent of downtown Nairobi along Kirinyaga Road. If this is the face of Kenya and this is the place that sells Kenya fast, I think we need to be a bit more strategic even in terms of location and in terms of even acquiring the properties so that we can kill two birds with one stone. We should have the right address but more importantly, we should have a less recurrent expenditure when we own these properties. However, that is not the only problem with these missions. There is the issue of mobility. I have heard it from so many other Members. I think we are rushing too much into having presence in so many places yet we are not facilitating them in a way that befits their excellences. This is because you cannot give a person the title “His Excellency” or “Her Excellency” but the state at which they live and conduct their business is very far from that title. Also, I noted some few things and I have noted them in most of the places we have been going for parliamentary business. One is an issue that was raised by my colleague that some of these people go out of their way to look for opportunities for us Kenyans. I would like to cite an example. The Russian Embassy went out of its way and got 100 scholarships for the Kenyan youth, but I have to put it categorically that when these opportunities come to the relevant departments of Government, for example, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the truth of the matter is that some of the mandarins within those ministries and within those departments purport to want to sell these opportunities to the Kenyan youth. The outcome is that whereas we have many opportunities like in the last financial year, we had 100 opportunities for the Kenyan students to go for full paid scholarship to study in Russia; we only managed to take 33 because of the red tape and bottlenecks in our relevant departments here in Kenya. We need to align that so that we can take full advantage of the opportunities that we get. 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."
}