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{
    "id": 922313,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/922313/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 325,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Omogeni",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13219,
        "legal_name": "Erick Okong'o Mogeni",
        "slug": "erick-okongo-mogeni"
    },
    "content": "be proactive. It is high time we made an appeal to the President. If it is not working, then he should fix it. If Hon. Kiunjuri is unable to manage the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, let him ship out. That is a very important docket because we are talking about food security in this country. We even gave a proposal to the CS that he needed to come up with incentives to encourage more farmers to engage in farming and ensure seedlings of good quality are provided to the farmers. When we visited Nyamira County, we found seedlings that had been in the NCPB for the past six years. When farmers in Nyamira County planted them, they never grew. The farmers reported that they went to the NCPB in Nyansiongo, picked the seedlings and went away. They did not even bother to convene a forum to apologise or talk about compensating farmers who had bought the seedlings and invested in buying fertilizer, but harvested nothing. You can imagine how casual the CS approaches these issues. Those are peasants or small-scale farmers who have invested money, but got nothing in return. It is the Government that supplied the seedlings through the NCPB. That means something is wrong. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, allow me to make a strong appeal to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), which are agencies that are supposed to investigate issues of corruption. There must be some cartels benefitting from some of these issues surrounding maize production. How do you allow importation of fertiliser, which instead of helping farmers to have more yields, kills the seedlings and the farmers end up with nothing? I do not know of any country in the world that can fail to reward its own hardworking farmers. They farm their produce and at the end of the year, do not get paid. Is there any CS in this country who works for 12 months and is not paid? They are so insensitive to the plight of farmers, who depend on farming to pay school fees for their children and put food on the table, but are not paid. It is sad that we are approaching the end of 2019 and farmers who supplied maize to the NCPB way back in 2017 have not been paid to date. How insensitive and cruel can our Government be to our farmers? Kenya is a country that depends on maize for food sustainability. Most households in this country consume maize. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, we even made recommendation that we do not want the idea of a CS waking up one day and announcing to the country that he or she wants maize imported. We proposed to the CS that we need regulations and mechanisms of ensuring that the market and business environment is free and fair to everybody. That way, it will not be a matter of some cartels waking up one day and telling us that there will be food shortage, and we need to import maize. The question we should ask is why maize should be imported at a time when farmers are about to harvest their maize? Everybody can see malice. They want to do it in bad faith. The interest is profiteering and not ensuring that we have food security. They want to discourage the farmers so that next year we are told that there is shortage and a window is opened again for importation. We are here to represent our people, and this is something what we should not allow. If we discourage our maize farmers, it will reach a time when we will have no 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."
}