Prof. Sam Ongeri

All parliamentary appearances

Entries 761 to 770 of 1925.

• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: One element that I want people to appreciate is that health sanitation plays a major role in preventing many diseases that may occur. Currently, we have floods in this country and the next thing that you will hear of is epidemics. Many people will perish in peripheral areas. We have heard of floods in Turkana, Wajir, Marsabit, Kisii and even Nairobi. The only way of keeping pace with issues happening at the rural level, urban and peri-urban centres is by having community workers who can do surveillance. Without surveillance, it will be very difficult to keep pace. We are talking ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: areas of danger like checking blood pressure and monitoring that the mothers do not go into premature labour. Those community workers are able to monitor any slight degree of disturbance in pregnancy, particularly the bleeding disorders that may occur leading to danger during child delivery. These are people who can do it effectively and monitor it. In fact, if we interface technology, these people can transmit critical information to the primary health centre or to the primary community health hospital where that information can be analysed and feedback given for us to spend little time, but be quick in saving ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: What are we looking at from this community worker? We should build them or capacitate them with simple basic tools that can do health measurements. They should be able to know if that child has been immunised or not. There are certain basic diseases like malaria that need to be immunised. We now have a vaccine in some of the areas. Tuberculosis has a very critical immunisation process and that includes measles. When I was a practicing doctor, there was a time when all our outpatients were abated by measles. More than 80 per cent patients in the outpatient clinics ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: Today, we pride ourselves of being techno savvy. We use M-Pesa with much abandon. We transfer millions and billions of shillings through M-Pesa and a mother who does not know how to handle technology can send money to the daughter or the son using M-Pesa. Therefore, we can use our smartphones to monitor and evaluate the disease process and the health standards in our community. We can then reduce the distances and clerkship work where the clerk has to ask for the patient’s name, village and all that. These technology tools can also help us monitor blood pressure within seconds. ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for allowing me to second this important Motion. The House should appreciate that this Report of 647 pages is for 20 counties. The sheer volume of the Report may scare quite a number of us from reading it. However, the first few pages will give you a summary of the highlights of events that we captured as the most outstanding elements that require scrutiny and attention particularly of those who come from the respective counties. You can interrogate the report on your own county based on the Report that we have generated. Let me ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: We looked at the financial statements as presented by the Auditor-General. One of the things that struck us was non-compliance of approved budgets. People just went abandon. In some cases, we noted that the budgets that were approved were only approved for public consumption but the actual budgets that were being operated were other budgets that were not captured both in County Integrated Development Plans (CIDPs) and also the Annual Development Plans (ADPs). Therefore, they operated different modules all together. That is why they faced difficulties with the Auditor- General when they were being questioned on how they applied the ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: had markets all over various places and various areas and they had not been able to automate their collection points and, therefore, it was very difficult for them to collect money from various centres. I think the Chairman of the County Public Accounts and Investments Committee has already made comments on the modes of collection, automation and collection of resources. There are so many platforms that are in use at the moment. You have the G- pay, Integrated Payroll and Payroll Database (IPPD), and others. These have not been synchronised or have not been made to be in sync with ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: Corruption Commission (EACC), if we think that public resources have been squandered or misapplied, that they should investigate further and bring the culprits to book without any mercy. This is because we cannot accept a situation where we are fighting so hard to give resources to the counties only for them to be misappropriated in one form or the other. Therefore, you will be able to find out when you skim through the Report. The fifth point that we noted as part of the Report is poor records and books of accounts. When we looked at how they are representing ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: The sixth thing was obviously the weak human resource management and recruitment of staff, which was extremely irregular. I think that the governors took it that, that was an area where they were not likely to be audited, and they went on a rampage, recruiting people as and when they felt like. Suddenly, when you look at the budget proportion for the recurrent vis-à-vis the development expenditure, by law you should spend a minimum of 30 per cent on development expenditure. However, in reality, what we found out was that some of the county’s expenditure on development was sometimes 7 ... view
• 22 Oct 2019 in Senate: Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other area that we noted was extremely difficult was weak internal control systems. The Chair has already said much of it. One area that I needed to respond to, is the lack of legislation and policy to address matters of staff pension. The pension programme in these counties is in disarray. The sooner we apply, through a legislative mechanism on how the pensions are going to be run in these counties, the sooner will they run into problems. This is because these are our people who are working for the counties; they are supposed to ... view