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{
"id": 884030,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/884030/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Murkomen",
"speaker_title": "The Senate Majority Leader",
"speaker": {
"id": 440,
"legal_name": "Onesimus Kipchumba Murkomen",
"slug": "kipchumba-murkomen"
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"content": "regulation are nothing compared to the benefits that come with having institutions or entities dealing with specialized crops focusing on those crops. Madam Temporary Speaker, I think it was a mistake, before the advent of devolution, for us to amalgamate and do away with the various entities, and replace with a huge Board which, in reality, is a representation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. I am told that the reason why AFA is not working is because it is competing with the Ministry itself. The AFA has been amalgamated to carry everything that the Ministry has to do and, as such, a strong AFA is considered to be a strong Ministry. Therefore, there is a competition between the Cabinet Secretary (CS) and the institution that is called AFA. To add to that complication is the fact that you have the Director-General of that institution as well as the directors of various sectors, including tea, who compete with each other. You will find a situation whereby the resources that are given to that one parastatal, because it is calculated to mean that it is just one parastatal compared to other parastatals, whether in energy, environment and so on, and so forth. Therefore, we have one body getting resources to manage various directorates that are naturally or initially parastatals competing for those resources. Madam Temporary Speaker, the internal management challenges within the AFA which include, favouritism, competition, fear of succession and so on, and so forth, derail the most important issue; which is the fact that we need to make sure that agriculture continues to be our leading foreign exchange earner and employer in the country. We are discussing, as a nation, how we are struggling with employment of young people. We, therefore, need to move from merely agriculture for the sake of it, towards agribusiness. This is what Sen. Farhiya alluded to in her presentation; that we should not just think about the farmer producing tea; we must think about where the market is and who the consumer is. This means that we need to become strategic in the manner in which we handle and manage various sectors of agriculture. The debate we had here about maize and tea should apply to coffee, coconut, pyrethrum, the livestock farming sector and different crops across the country. Madam Temporary Speaker, I have said this here before; in this country, we like reaping where we did not sow. For instance, we do not invest in our athletes, but we want them to be the best athletes in the world. We want them to be the best in terms of marketing our country and employment of young people. We do not invest in agriculture, but we want to make the assumption that it is automatically going to be the leading foreign exchange earner and employer in the country. Madam Temporary Speaker, I made my contribution earlier on the need to have a proper policy guiding devolution, and I emphasized it even during the Devolution Conference. We need to have one sitting, as a country, the same way we sat to discuss issues of corruption and many other issues, we must discuss about agricultural production and not just food security. I have seen that the Big Four Agenda is about food security; that is basic. We must move beyond food security. In fact, the component of food security, manufacturing and unemployment can all be sorted out using the agriculture sector. This is because in agriculture lies the question of value addition, employment, 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."
}