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{
    "id": 878030,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/878030/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 471,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Were",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13183,
        "legal_name": "Petronila Were Lokorio",
        "slug": "petronila-were-lokorio"
    },
    "content": "Thank you very much, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir. I would also like to thank the leadership of this Committee, of which I was honoured to be a Member. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to dwell on only one issue, which is that agriculture is a devolved function. Counties have abdicated this function and left it to the national Government, which is abusing it. Therefore, counties need to take it upon themselves that this maize issue and any other issue within the agricultural sector is their mandate. They need to provide millers in their counties; they need to put up silos as well as driers in at least each constituency in their counties in the maize producing regions in the Western Region of this country. Similarly, where the national Government fails to provide subsidies, they need to come in and do so. Right now, the national Government has said that they will not provide subsidies for fertilizer. The counties should have taken it upon themselves to adjust their budgets and provide subsidies for fertilizer in their supplementary budgets and also come up with mechanisms of distributing the fertilizers, seeds, as well as disbursement of money. They need to take it upon themselves because they are closest to the farmers and they know everything about each farmer. They have structures in the villages. Therefore, they need to work on the data for farmers. For example, who are maize farmers in Trans Nzoia? How many hectares does each farmer have so that when it comes to payment by NCPB, they know their farmers? They do not need to need to take the list of farmers to anywhere else. They should be the reference point for farmers in that county so that we do not have the so called cartels. It is because there is a vacuum somewhere that is filled by these cartels. Counties have failed to take it upon themselves to perform this function. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, when we went to Nandi County, they kept on complaining about something they called “a system’. They claimed that counties have received a ‘system’ from the national level that is supposedly registering farmers. That ‘system’ is complicated and they are using it as a cartel. ‘System’ and cartel are two words used interchangeably in those counties. Therefore, I request counties to take agriculture seriously as their function, perform it and stop creating a vacuum that creates all these problems. If people at the national level decides for farmers, they will obviously have no idea of what exactly is on the ground. They will, therefore, come up with their own issues. We had people paid in Bungoma County, but they were not farmers. They owned hectares of land that no one in Bungoma can own. Why is that so? It is possible that these farmers could come from another county and declare that they are farmers from Bungoma. This is because Bungoma County does not have a register of its farmers. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, lastly, the issues that we found when we visited the counties are real issues and they brought a crisis in this country. It affected the whole country because unga or maize is a stable food in Kenya. So, the whole country was affected. We need to take this Report seriously and not politicize it. Farmers complained 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."
}