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"id": 854939,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/854939/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
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"speaker": {
"id": 210,
"legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
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"content": "Mr. Speaker, Sir, we must have this. The Committee has recommended that Clause 7 be deleted because it does not make much sense to PPPs. On Clause 8 of the Bill, the Committee will be recommending – my Chairman may have said this because the House was very loudly consulting – that even in the counties, it will not be the county executive to source private partners and execute the transactions on their own. County assemblies must have a say. Whatever transactions they enter into must be subjected to the approval of the county assemblies. Mr. Speaker, Sir, in my view, the most important Clause in this Bill is Clause 10. It realizes that if you strictly go in accordance with public procurement and disposal act provisions, then you will never give the contracting parties, particularly the counties, a fair deal. Most counties do not have sufficient expertise. This provision now opens up; that instead of the usual ways of saying; in procurement parties are not allowed to sit and talk prior or they are not supposed to fix this and that. This opens the window for the unit to assist the counties where necessary and give the necessary expertise to do prior negotiations so that by the time they come to procurement, everybody is in tandem with the technical aspects, financials, timelines and eventually the economic benefits of the projects. This, if we strictly went to the Public Procurement and Disposal Act, will not happen because the moment you start negotiating with a tenderer, you are already presumed to be flouting the law by fixing. Here is a situation where parties are allowed to go step by step so that everybody understands because PPP projects are not projects of Kshs1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 million. These are mega projects. I do not expect that any county will start entering into PPPs to run projects of Kshs10 or 15 million because those can be financed directly by their budgets. You are talking about looking for projects that have long term financing; either build, operate and transfer; build, own, operate and transfer or build and transfer, whatever the arrangement you have. So, Clauses 10 and 11 provide that this is very important to be followed. Clause 12(1) is equally important because it provides for the contracting entity – especially, I am focusing on counties because they are the ones that do not have a lot of capacity – will be allowed to talk to three, four or five competing parties. They can talk to part “A”, “B” or “3” and see which one is giving them the best deal. This is how counties can have value for money. In general terms, PPPs can be very good but they can also be very dangerous if the country‟s institutions of governance do not do their work. What may happen in some situations is that you will find in a county that those in the executive benefit from these private partnerships through phoney companies, offshore companies and so on. I urge that we tighten the law so that when the assemblies look at the process, when this Senate looks at the process and when the PPP unit looks at the process, they make sure that provisions of probity, fair play, honesty and lack of corruption in the transactions are adhered to so that if it is a transaction in Isiolo County, it should never be The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}