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{
    "id": 896528,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/896528/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 108,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "North Imenti, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Rahim Dawood",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2572,
        "legal_name": "Abdul Rahim Dawood",
        "slug": "abdul-rahim-dawood"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Speaker. First, I want to thank the President for his speech on the state of the nation. My previous colleague has talked of it not being strong, but I think we have gone far from where we were many years back. That is because when he graduated, after that there was a lull in how the country was being run. But that is beside the point. We have devolved more than Kshs1.7 trillion to the counties. That was in the President’s speech. That money was from 2013. What have we got out of the counties besides more corruption and more people being employed? We need to think about how we are going about this county through devolution. The President noted that the economy has been improving over the last five years by 5.6 per cent and he put a figure of 6.3 per cent for 2019. Unfortunately, it is in the public domain that the Central Bank of Kenya said the economy will not grow at 6.3 per cent but 5.3 per cent because of the drought. I am even surprised that when the President was doing his State of the Nation Address, he never even mentioned the drought. I do not know whether he has not seen the drought or he has not heard about it or he was not in Kenya when the drought situation befell the country. I believe his handlers should have told him more about it. When we are talking about our economy going up by 6.3 per cent, the debt is going up by 14 per cent every year. We need to bring this debt down. The President, together with the former prime minister have gone to China. They should not sign the agreement for the new SGR from Naivasha going all the way to Kisumu. We should first be told how much the SGR is bringing from Mombasa to Nairobi. Is it paying itself or it is not? We cannot load debt on debt. At the end of the day, we will not survive. As a country, we may go the French revolution way where Marie Antoinette said: “If you cannot eat bread, eat cake.” I think we are treading on dangerous grounds and we need to sort that out. Regarding corruption, like the previous speaker has said, the fish rots from the head. If we can handle the corruption issue, we have a lot of money in this country. But we have to have the will. The way is there but the will is not. If we sort the corruption issue, we will be very far in this country. The programme of 100 per cent transition from primary to secondary school was very good, but where is the infrastructure? We need the infrastructure, the teachers and… When the President says we should not do new projects, for many of the first term Members if there were no projects from last Parliament, how do they get projects and how do they get re-elected? It is the job of an MP to look for projects. If the President has put a moratorium on new projects, how do we get new projects? In the morning, when the Leader of the Majority Party was contributing, he quoted a section of the Bible. Hon. Mogaka said it is criminal for a Muslim to talk about the Bible. Let me inform Hon. Mogaka that there is nothing criminal about a Muslim quoting the Bible. I have done theology in the university and I was not denied the chance to study theology. We need to talk about the universal health care. We are not getting the right things in the universal health care. In manufacturing, second hand car dealers need to be supported and not thrown out by…"
}