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{
    "id": 883160,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/883160/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 400,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kitui Central, WDM-K",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Makali Mulu",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1955,
        "legal_name": "Benson Makali Mulu",
        "slug": "benson-makali-mulu"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. Let me add my voice to this important debate. Listening to Members debate, I thank Hon. Katoo for setting some records straight, although I think he did it a bit late. The Leader of the Majority Party raised very pertinent issues about this visit. If I was the Chair of the Committee, I would have come in at that point to set the record straight because this is a House of records, but they say it is better late than never. Now that we have the facts, we can debate a bit. This Report raises quite some fundamental issues. We need to thank the Committee for the initiative to go and monitor what is happening. Even though we are calling it an inquiry, this is what we are lacking in this House. Committees do not take the initiative to see what happens after appropriating resources. Instead of bashing them, we should encourage other Committees to go in that direction. Every year, we appropriate resources for ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). It is important to follow up and see what is happening before we start doing the postmortem after things have gone wrong and we are told that this went wrong 10 years ago and we cannot do much. That is a positive point. There are serious questions coming up. The first one is whether we did have any public participation on this project. Listening to our colleagues from the North Eastern Region, it looks like nobody consulted them in terms of this important wall. It might be important to the nation but it is more important to the locals. When the locals say that they do not see any importance of this wall, the question comes whether we might be getting value for money. That is important. As we do other projects in future, public participation which involves the locals is important. The other important point is the issue of the mystery which always surrounds projects related to defence in this country. Any time we talk about defence, it is like nobody should talk about issues to do with security. It is said that it is a security matter so we should keep off. I remember when we were amending the Audit Act, we said that in areas where national security is being compromised, we people who can verify but have been vetted to make sure that they cannot leak information. That may not have been implemented in such a project. It is high time that where we have invested such huge amounts of money like this, we ensure that we have vetted auditors who can be facilitated to go and see what is happening and report to the public that things have either gone right or wrong. At the end of the day, this is public money. We cannot appropriate public funds to such institutions and then we do not know what is happening. Time has come when this mystery around defence issues should start being exposed to the public and in that way, we will save money. Listening to this debate, there was a bit of bashing. I agree with Hon. Kioni when he says that even as we discuss our colleagues who sit on those Committees, it is important that we realise they are our colleagues. They are not out there. I would not want my friend, Hon. Wanyonyi, to be exposed to a risk where he might end up losing his life doing things which are not his primary duties. When people go to such risky areas, we need to appreciate that we need security. The fact that we are being facilitated by our defence forces to go and see cannot be said 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."
}