Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 850211,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/850211/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 516,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nambale, ANC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Sakwa Bunyasi",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2511,
        "legal_name": "John Sakwa Bunyasi",
        "slug": "john-sakwa-bunyasi"
    },
    "content": "very high. There is very high propensity to spend and if there are savings it will be good, of course, to invest. It will take care of the basic needs like schools fees and, perhaps, medicals but it will provide a financial within the overall banking system. In many of our towns like Nambale which is our capital city, it has only one financial services provider. That is our bank. That is where our people go to save their money or they travel much farther out to go to Busia, Bungoma or Mumias if they have to catch a bank. In developed countries, the SACCOs and credit unions have been major vehicles for mopping up savings in distant areas. They get aggregated because they also do bank with others and that way, the affinity of people to their financial intuitions has grown. In fact, I remember just as recently as 35 years ago, in the USA, there were very few cross-state institutions and many of them had grown from farmers’ cooperatives kind of SACCOs. They use different names in different parts of the country but those became the banks. When they grew, they were bought over by conglomerates and you cannot identify them. However, even in rural USA now and in small cities, you still find SACCOs playing a major role. In my career at the World Bank, I always banked and I still bank with the credit union. I do not bank with commercial banks. Again, these are savings of members of staff of a particular institution and their families and so on. These are extremely important. I am very happy with the changes that are proposed. I am happy that SASRA is beginning to take shape and perhaps have teeth. I hope that SASRA, through the use of ICT, will be able to capture the activities of all SACCOs within which there will be a specific category of deposit-taking SACCOs. Deposit-taking SACCOs have the same philosophical risk arguments as those which do not take deposits. Why? This is because government allows an institution to be set up. People have trust in it because it is registered and they surrender their money to it. Then government has the responsibility to safeguard that trust. In addition to buying shares where you are supposed to take the risk directly individually, you now put in your deposit and you are even now expecting a higher level of trust. So, it is fair and right that we have regulatory environment that tightens and safeguards this trust in these financial institutions. We have programmes for housing. We think that housing will come from manna or it will be taxed forcefully from salaries of people. That is an approach that is being adopted. The other way that housing has developed is by encouraging SACCOs and saving associations that then provide those small loans that people have used to improve their homes and houses in many parts of the world. So, we are in the right track on this one. However, we are in an environment that has probably greater challenges than many other countries. We have an environment of great impunity where people can get away. We read in the newspapers somebody made off with I do not know how many billions or this or that. They might think that even if I do not pay my loan… If I pretend I want a loan I just take out money. If I am a director and I take off with people’s money in these institutions they will not catch up with me. That is what we must fight. We must fight that with all our strength because it is through respect for institutions like these that we shall be able to build the capital base and increase the savings of this nation that provide the funds that will then ultimately go into investment. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, in the last Parliament, there were strong arguments in this House that said we should remove all youth from the Credit Reference Bureau transactions. Youth in our country is defined as 35 years and below. If you are a 30-year-old man who is cheating, you are not a youth really. If you are a 19-year-old crook, you are an adult. If you are going to develop institutions of this kind in which participants in these institutions are going to belong to all ages, then can we say that you are old enough to transact in borrowing but not old 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."
}