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"id": 948799,
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"speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
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"speaker": {
"id": 210,
"legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
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"content": "Thank you, Madam Temporary Speaker, for giving me an opportunity to contribute to this Motion by Sen. Kasanga. When we debated the Forest Act in the Ninth Parliament, I said then that we cannot, as a country, make forests a no-go zone. We should allow people to live with forests and benefit from them. There are communities, including mine, where certain sections and families do not believe in modern medicine, and have lived up to a hundred years. They go to the forest and harvest plants that they use as medicine. Families go to forests to collect dead wood to use as fuel for cooking and warming their houses. Families protect forests where there is order. Madam Temporary Speaker, this great idea has flown with the wind. When you look at what is happening to our forests – for example in the Mau Forest, Mt. Elgon, Embombut Forest, Cherang’any Hills, some pockets of West Pokot, Mt. Kenya Region, Aberdares, within Nairobi, not to mention Arabuko Sokoke Forests at the Coast – you will think that we are at war against our own country. So much damage is going on. People who are causing the destruction of forests in this country are not poor. It is the rich people who surround themselves and tell their poor neighbours to leave them their two or three acres, go to the forest and get four or five acres. Madam Temporary Speaker, as I said before, if we want to arrest this situation, we must look at the cause. This Motion seeks to give effect to some of the provisions of the Forest Act, not to mention the Constitution. In the Forest Act, one of the key provisions that we put in the Ninth Parliament was that we make it mandatory for the country to attain the 10 per cent forest cover. Land owners – whether it is the State, the county councils as trust land, institutions, for example, schools and universities or individual owners – were obligated to plant a minimum of 10 per cent of that land with trees, either as a woodlot or perimeter fencing. We even envisaged that there will be extension officers, like those we used to have in agriculture whom we used to call Karakacha, roaming all over telling people how to look after their coffee and animals. In health, we use to have the Bora Afya people, who would tell us how to trap and kill mosquitoes to avoid malaria. Madam Temporary Speaker, my brother, Sen. Poghisio, was with me in that Parliament. We envisaged that we will have extension officers that will come to people’s farms. If a person has three acres of land, he or she would tell the farmer that 10 per cent of the land will accommodate such a number of trees, so that they plant them around their farms or create a woodlot. We would achieve the aggregate of 10 per cent that we gave ourselves that time, which was still ridiculously low. I understand that in the 1950s, a country like South Korea, which many of us have visited many times, had less than 10 per cent forest cover. However today, they have over 70 per cent forest cover. This is a fact. Therefore, for us to give ourselves 10 per cent was a little too mean on ourselves, especially when we can see the amount of destruction that we have committed to our forests. 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."
}