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{
    "id": 979979,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/979979/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 225,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nyeri Town, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Ngunjiri Wambugu",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13460,
        "legal_name": "Martin Deric Ngunjiri Wambugu",
        "slug": "martin-deric-ngunjiri-wambugu"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I was saying that, as I read through this Bill, there is a thing that confuses me a bit when I think through the various aspects of it. For example, I read about how the board will be formed and how it will function. I keep asking myself who we are making this Tea Bill for. As a country, we get stuck a lot on what the country is doing, how the country is doing and how the sector is doing. I keep asking myself this: “Yes, the sector could be doing well! Yes, we could be the leading exporter of tea. Yes, our tea is one of the best in the world. But how is the farmer doing?” I think when all is said and done in this House, the person we need to be thinking about and worried about the most is the farmer. I will support this Bill, but I will support it on condition that we make certain amendments to it. For example, when we come to discuss the formation of the board, I would like to see a farmer sit on that board with no other qualification, but the fact that he or she is a tea farmer. That is because if you are going to have a conversation about somebody’s crop, please have him on board. Please have him around the table. I have seen that one of the qualifications for being the chairman is that you have to have a master’s degree. I am asking myself how many tea farmers I know at this moment in time who can qualify for that. Why are we assuming that you need to have a master’s degree to discuss tea issues when some people have been growing this crop for decades and have done a good job? Why are we not thinking about those people? We are talking about liberalising the market but, again, I ask myself: “We are liberalising it for who?” We have talked about brokers and cartels. We keep talking about cartels until somebody once asked who cartels are. Cartels could be people who sit in this House. Hon. Deputy Speaker, we need to go back to the fundamentals of agriculture. I have heard complaints of people saying: “If we do a Tea Bill, we will have to do a coffee and cotton Bill.” I have many coffee farmers in Nyeri Town. If that is what it is going to take to sort out agriculture and make the farmers make money, then let us do it. If the farmer is making money because we have a tea, cotton or coffee authority, then let us get it done. The reason we are here is to stand for the interests of the farmers. If we are not standing for the interests of the farmer, then we are part of the problem because we will be representing the interests of the brokers in between. Those cartels we talk about, whether the cartel is the exporter, factory, marketer, or processor, are taking money away from the farmer. The worst and unfortunate bit of it is that if the farmer did not exist, none of those people would exist. The only reason they exist is because 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."
}