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{
    "id": 911034,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/911034/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 655,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Kibiru",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13196,
        "legal_name": "Charles Reubenson Kibiru",
        "slug": "charles-reubenson-kibiru"
    },
    "content": "Madam Temporary Speaker, something came up in the Senate Committee on Public Accounts and Investments (CPAIC), where I sit. Last time when the governor came before CPAIC, she told us that her county had pending bills amounting to Kshs160 million. However, she says that when the Auditor-General started auditing, the pending bills have increased to over Kshs460 million. There is mathematics that is not working out when it comes to the utilization of the public money. This is taxpayers’ money, therefore, every penny must be put into rightful use. In the same Committee, we are proposing that it is high time we started talking about performance audit. Some of these issues of stalled projects have been raised by the Auditor-General. However, I think we need to map out those stalled projects so that we fix the cut-off. Let nobody start new projects; we should let the old projects be the first charged in the budgets as we move forward. Let us make penalties for governors who violate that kind of understanding, that one must complete the stalled projects before they can think of starting new ones. Madam Temporary Speaker, there is this argument that probably the stalled projects did not have feasibility studies carried out by the people who started them. Granted, but then as a manager of an organisation, the best one can do is to map out those projects and see if they can be utilised for another value. For example, we have police posts that are still stalled with nothing happening there. Can they, probably, be made assistant chiefs’ offices or they be utilised in a different way? If it is a health centre that is too close to another one, could we utilise it in doing something else instead of making public money lie idle? Deterioration of stalled projects is very high. The moment you start building a house and it stalls, by the time you come back to start re-construction of the same building, the cost may have doubled. In a nutshell, the Motion seeks to force the county and national Government to ensure that we take care of all the stalled projects. The starting point is, probably, to map them out."
}