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{
    "id": 956075,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/956075/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 324,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Ugenya, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon David Ochieng’",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1007,
        "legal_name": "Christine Oduor Ombaka",
        "slug": "christine-oduor-ombaka"
    },
    "content": "I stand to support the Bill. One of the many ambitions as a country is to industrialise. We hope that in the next 30 years, Kenya should have risen to a truly middle income country joining the rest of the world in raising the living standards of its people. One of the parameters of knowing whether a country is growing is the ease of access to credit or loans; the ease with which people are able to get money to do business. Last week I heard the President talking about how Singapore has grown and that he hopes Kenya will go the Singapore way. I wanted to tell the President that such things do not just happen. Someone has to sit down and work on them. Partly, working on them means reining in on banks or institutions that prey on public needs and services; the banking industry today is known to make very high profits every year. In fact, nowadays they compete on the billions they will return in profits. If you see the bonuses paid to CEOs and the top executives of banks, you will be shocked. But employees remain with the same salaries. A CEO of a bank gets between Kshs40 and Kshs50 million in bonuses, but employees do not get a pay rise. For us to grow, we must say as a country that the service industry will be run based on market fundamentals. When we leave market fundamentals to run the banking sector and it runs amok, then Parliament must and will always come to the aid of the public. That is why I support the Bill. The elasticity of the banking industry is very high. If banks would show goodwill or show that they are willing to walk with us in ensuring that the country grows, if they could show that they are disciplined, and if they could show that they are patriotic and that their interest apart from profits is also to walk along with Kenyans in helping the country grow, then we would have a reason to sit back and say that let them self-regulate. But the history we have is such that every time we allow them to self-regulate, they sit in board rooms and come up with charges and do things like fixing prices of loans and all that. That is why Parliament becomes a very important institution that should help Kenyans get what they need. We have seen in the last one or two years the merger of banks or banks buying one another. Why? It is because they want to reduce competition. So, the day we allow them to fix interest rates and they have bought everyone else and they are three or four of them in the country, interest rates will be 25 to 27 per cent. Even when we have good economic times, you will never hear a bank saying it is going to reduce interest rates for those taking loans. But look at what happens anytime a small thing happens and financial markets are disturbed a bit, the 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."
}