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{
    "id": 896651,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/896651/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 231,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nambale, ANC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Sakwa Bunyasi",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2511,
        "legal_name": "John Sakwa Bunyasi",
        "slug": "john-sakwa-bunyasi"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I rise to support the basic thrust of the President’s Address that he delivered a few days ago. For me, these kinds of speeches emphasise constitutionality of our country. We have a set of conduct codified in the law and the Constitution that we follow. This is important because increasingly, we have personalised our achievement and lack of it around individuals. I want to start off in the middle of what I have to say. It is an important area of concern. It is on the issue of corruption. Corruption in any country degrades its social fabric. It distorts the allocation of resources and gives the wrong lessons across generations. Intergenerational changes are highly distorted by corruption. To deal with corruption, we have instruments of investigation, the law and the courts to help us with enforcement. It should remain strictly within the tenets as defined in the letter and the spirit of the law. It must be 360 degrees. If you want to combat corruption, fight it wherever it is. If you are unidirectional, like a fan fixed at one corner, and you think that you will fight corruption that way, you will miss nearly all of it in the areas that will be behind you. If we are going to succeed in fighting corruption, and for the President to deliver a legacy on it, it must be fought 360 degrees. It is then that it will be removed geographically across this country, in institutions and sectors. That is what will help us deal with the demon of corruption. It is important that we deal with it and move 360 degrees around it. Kenya has entered into a number of treaties. Many times, we do not get sufficient participation, and as such we do not get their implications on our side. We talk about opening our market to improve access to foreign markets in areas which we have a fledgling growth and capacity like in agriculture and agricultural processing without doing a balanced assessment. Each time we seek to open, we must open. When we open, it becomes a critical decision that can make a difference between success and failure. We are an agricultural country still at the stage of rain dependent. Our irrigation is completely – if I may use a polite word – primitive. Therefore, when we opened up our agriculture – as we have sometimes done – we do so prematurely. In countries that have succeeded in agriculture globally including those in Europe and Asia, the sector of agriculture was the last one to be opened. We opened ours at about the same time when everything else was opened. That is where most of our employment comes from. That is why we run a big risk of getting undermined by countries that have come into the global economy with their agricultural sectors mature and ready. The President said that the nation is strong. I would have added to it that the nation may be strong at the core but we have issues. We who live in the border counties such as Busia have lost jobs at the border because of trade reforms and nothing was put in place to mitigate that. Each time you have a good thing, praise it and think about who benefits and who may not benefit even if the aggregate may be a beneficial one. We must step back and look at the high unemployment rate that has been created, the opportunities for trade at the borders that are now going to be disrupted because of the changes that have been made in the policy but nobody has looked at the consequences. 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."
}