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{
    "id": 908573,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/908573/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 67,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Garissa Township, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Aden Duale",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 15,
        "legal_name": "Aden Bare Duale",
        "slug": "aden-duale"
    },
    "content": "economic shocks. If we kill SMEs by holding their money for too long, then, we will affect the general wellbeing of our economy. We must pay pending bills so that stalled projects are completed. If you go to our constituencies, you will see stalled projects. When you ask the contractors what the reason is, they say that they have not been paid. It is good we pay the pending bills for roads, water and healthcare projects so that they do not stall. In this regard, I support the Budget and Appropriations Committee in their recommendation in the Report. They have asked the National Treasury to come up with a policy framework for completion of stalled projects by 1st October 2019. When we reach that date, we expect the Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury to present to this House a policy framework on how he will deal with the completion of stalled projects. I welcome that proposal to amend the Public Finance Management Act to provide for penalties for failure to settle pending bills. This is where we should go. The Chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee is seated behind me. He has put that in his recommendations that we need to amend the Public Finance Management Act and provide for penalties for failure to settle pending bills. If the Government cannot settle pending bills over a certain period, there must be penalties. If money borrowed from banks is not paid, one has to pay penalties. The bulk of the recurrent expenditure, which is approximately (technical hitch) for all the MDAs, is mainly under the State Department of Interior and Coordination of National Government and the Ministry of Defence and State Department for Early Learning. There is a problem of recurrent expenditure in county governments. Between 60 and 65 per cent of the money that we send to county governments is used for paying salaries, not of important professions like doctors and nurses, but for paying relatives and friends of governors who call themselves advisors and get fake degrees from River Road. We cannot allow this. The essence of devolution was to take development to our people. The essence of devolution was to build more hospitals, do more roads and improve agriculture and livestock. If devolution is going to be as we are seeing, paying salaries… Today, if a young man posts something on Facebook, the next morning he is given a letter by a governor to become the youth advisor in county executive committee’s office. The Public Service Commission (PSC) must do an audit and rationalisation. You cannot have a country where all the taxes are used to pay salaries. This applies to the national Government. The bulk of the capital spending in this Budget, which is approximately 45 per cent of the total MDAs capital budget, is accounted mainly for under the Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development, the programme of road transport. Infrastructure is getting a huge budget. The Department of Transport, the Ministry of Water and Sanitation, the State Department of Energy and the State Department of Housing and Urban development... With this budget, we want more Kenyans to be connected to electricity. We want this story of having generator sets in Wajir and Mandera to stop. You can use the sun. There is a lot of sun in northern Kenya. You can put serious solar projects in Wajir that can give 10 to 15 megawatts. When I became a Member of Parliament for a constituency called Dujis in 2007, I was a victim of those engines. But through the help of President Uhuru Kenyatta, Garissa, my 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."
}