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{
    "id": 980644,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/980644/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 255,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nyaribari Masaba, NAPK",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Ezekiel Ombaki",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13458,
        "legal_name": "Ezekiel Machogu Ombaki",
        "slug": "ezekiel-machogu-ombaki"
    },
    "content": " Thank you very much, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker for giving me this opportunity to also contribute. At the outset, I would like to declare my interest that from a very young age of 10 years, I became a tea picker because my parents had a small-scale tea farm. Ever since then, I have been in this business. I know it from the beginning until the end. As we all know and as it has been said, tea is the top most foreign exchange earner for this country. Tea is the source of income for quite a number of our farmers. Almost 600,000 households in this country are in the tea-growing areas. Tea is the major source of employment in the country. When you look at the history of this crop, you will see that in certain years in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, there was quite a remarkable improvement which enticed farmers to grow more. Currently, we are on a downward trend. If it were not for the pronouncement of the President on 6th January which gave farmers a little bit of consolation, farmers like those in my constituency were uprooting tea. It is not only my constituency. It is almost all over the country. As a Parliament, we need to come in and make sure that we intervene at the right time because unless we do so, we will lose a major crop which plays a very critical role in the economy of this country. No other crop can give us the kind of foreign exchange and employment that we generate each and every year out of tea. The reason for the downward trend with regard to this crop is its management and partly what we did in this House in 2013. During that particular time, we thought we were amalgamating all those bodies and bringing them under one body which is the AFA for purposes of efficiency, effectiveness and for the benefit of the farmer. We repealed Cap.343 which was the then Tea Act and came up with this amorphous body. We are now informed that we have a directorate which is supposed to look into the issues of tea but, ever since the establishment of that amorphous body, I am afraid to say that the functions that were being undertaken by the Tea Board of Kenya have been neglected. TBK was in a way counter-checking what KTDA does. It was offering checks and balances. There was a little bit of accountability which is missing now. We have now come in with a body which has captured the interests of the farmers. The farmer is producing, sweating and working day and night. You see the old mamas waking up even when it is raining at 6.00 a.m. and picking tea until 6.00 p.m. but they get peanuts from their sweat. The farmer gets Kshs15 for a kilogramme, but KTDA gets Kshs300 at the end of the day. You ask where this other money is going. The money is going into the pockets of crooks. It is incumbent upon Parliament to come in because the law is not static. Even if we came up with that law in 2013 and we realised that it is not serving the purposes for which it was intended, it is incumbent upon us to change it because the law is dynamic. If we do not do so as a Parliament, our role will be functionally redundant. We will be doing Kenyans a great disservice. 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."
}