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{
    "id": 851322,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/851322/?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": "Fortune 500 who have headquarters in Silicon Valley. Without the initial funding and the seed capital, those companies would never have seen the light of day. We also need to expand our capital markets to support the same amendment being proposed in the SACCO Societies Act so that we can have more venture capitalists and private equity funds who can provide the much-needed capital, especially for ideas. There are scanty sources for this kind of funding. This is a very critical amendment as far as I am concerned. Going back to Silicon Valley, there are people called the PayPal Mafia. Those are the people who founded PayPal. Some of them provided funding. You see a concurrence and many companies emerging from the same cabal because they had the money and were willing to invest in new ideas from YouTube to Tesla Motors to SpaceX . Those are now big behemoths and companies which would never have existed were it not for funding from those venture capitalists who were willing to take risks. That is why I support the amendment in the SACCO Societies Act because it provides that avenue of funding for many Kenyan youth who have bright ideas which can be commercialised and become big companies. I have also seen the proposed amendment in so far as the Micro and Small Enterprises Act of 2012 is concerned. The intent of this amendment is to have a breakthrough and enhance the way small and medium enterprises conduct business in terms of capital and how they get finance. Micro and medium enterprises are the biggest employers in this country. Those are companies that are run by people who may not have a lot of opportunities to look for market by themselves. This amendment - and especially combining it with the amendment on the Crop Act, which is trying to add value to the agricultural produce that we get in this country - will go a long way in spurring the same sub-sector of small businesses, especially in so far as agribusiness is concerned. Our competitive advantage as a country is in farming. We should gear our investments towards manufacturing in terms of adding value to the produce that we get from our farms. As a youth of this country, I have a lot of interest in the amendment proposed to gaming and lotteries. The Leader of the Majority Party put it very well that we need to balance between raising taxes and maintaining the moral fabric of our nation. Currently, most of our youth are engaged in this hope that you can keep on betting and engaging in lotteries and you do not need to work extra hard to create wealth because there is a supposed short-cut to getting rich. It is my feeling that we need to increase taxes on betting. Henry Ford used to say that if you earn money and you are not engaged in any kind of production that is more or less respectable graft. There is no way lotteries and gambling add any value to the economy of this country. There is nothing like production in lottery. Therefore, we need to look at the bigger picture and the greater cost of betting and lotteries so that we can come up with laws that put a stop or even a comma on the same. Finally, the amendment to the public-private partnership (PPP), especially in so far as building infrastructure is concerned is also very timely. Currently, we have a law that guides PPP in this country. Ever since we made that law in this House, there has never been even a single deal in this country closed on the basis of PPP because there are a lot of bottlenecks in so far as implementing the same law is concerned. I support this amendment because most of our finances, especially when it comes to funding our infrastructure, are derived from taxes. I support PPP and this amendment based on the principle of taxation called the benefit principle. Instead of taxing my grandmother to build a railway, it is better to call upon the private sector to do the same infrastructural development and tax the users of that railway instead of taxing someone who may never have any benefit in so far as that infrastructure is concerned. 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."
}