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{
    "id": 948673,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/948673/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 255,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Linturi",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 69,
        "legal_name": "Franklin Mithika Linturi",
        "slug": "franklin-linturi"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me this opportunity. Let me start by saying that I am a very frustrated tea farmer. In Meru County, 70 per cent of the farmers are tea growers. Meru County boasts of having a minimum of five tea factories. Out of the five, two come from the constituency that I represented when I was a Member of the National Assembly. I have grown with tea and understand the kind of problems that tea growers go through. I have listened to the speakers and would want to be very candid and go on record that this country has never had shortage of relevant legislations to support farmers. I do not think that there is any doubt between the 1980s and 1990s, most children went to school through money that came from tea farming, for those that come from tea growing areas. This is because it is the time that many Sacco’s mushroomed because of the good prices that we used to get out of tea. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I think there is somewhere we missed our steps. One of the things that I would attribute to the problems and the challenges that farmers face today is poor Government policy. We have a very insensitive Government that does not resonates or have the feeling of the problems afflicting our farmers. They move around or state that they are always proud that Kenya is an agricultural country and we want to make the country food secure. However, we can never make this country secure when there are no incentives to take people back to their farms to do farming. Farming is one of the surest ways of creating employment in this country. For those that were there during the time of the late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s and early years of former President Moi’s rule, when coffee and tea used to boom and there was pyrethrum and all sorts of crops, know that many families lived happily. This is because most of them were engaged in their farms and knew that after farming, they had somewhere to take their tea and pyrethrum, and there would be money. Nobody had fears of children being sent away from school for lack of fees. The economy was booming and the country was economically stable. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we need to understand what the pioneers of this country did because that ensured that we had a very stable country. We cannot guarantee peace in Kenya when nearly 90 per cent of the people are poor. Very few people can hardly live on beyond US dollars 5 a day. Therefore, as we look at this problem that our country and people are facing, we must be in a position, as we debate and support this Report, to come up with proposals. However, weird they will be, they should be proposals that can be a solution to these problems. We are limited in terms of how we ensure the Government takes on board the proposals that we make here to ensure that these challenges are addressed. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I had the opportunity to serve this country as a Member of Parliament when the Cabinet used to sit in Parliament. We used to sort out our 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."
}