Don’t lose focus, Dekow tells President Ruto

Garissa,

Monday November 13, 2023

KNA by Jacob Songok

 Garissa Township MP Dekow Mohamed has called on President William Ruto not to lose focus in his agenda of getting the country’s economy back on track.

Speaking at the Garissa Farmers Training Center during a UDM sensitization meeting ahead of the national election slated for December 9, Dekow said that Kenyans must wake up to the reality that raising taxes ‘was the only way to revive the country’s economy’.

“We don’t need to lie to ourselves and be populists. We are all aware that there are only two ways of financing the budget; either you borrow or you collect taxes from wananchi. And in the event you borrow, then you will have to pay with interest again,” Dekow said.

 “During the election campaigns in our manifesto, we told people that we will have affordable housing. We also spoke of universal health care, free education, improving security which we have a challenge in our region as well as the hustler fund. All those programmes require resources to implement them,” he added.

The Kenya Kwanza administration has in the recent past come under criticism from a section of Kenyans and institutions on over-taxation, the high cost of living, and unemployment among the youth that it had promised to tackle immediately it took power.

The Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops are among institutions that want the government to address various concerns to make the lives of ordinary citizens better.

Dekow hit out at the former President Uhuru Kenyatta regime accusing it of being the one that got the country in the hole it is today saying that it had borrowed Sh9. 8 trillion when the ceiling was Sh1 trillion.

The MP called on the ‘small parties’ affiliated to UDA to dissolve them noting that the country could only be unified under two strong political parties.

 “We want to have very strong democratic structures where the country is unified under two political parties but not regional or tribal parties,” the MP noted, adding that President Ruto has always fronted for a national party.

“It is for this reason that we are calling on our brothers and sisters including those from UDM to fold them so that we can have one agenda, manifesto that we can implement as a government,” he said.

Last week in his state of the national address, President Ruto said that Kenya has been living large and way above her means, ‘a situation that must change’.

 "We must admit that as a country we had been living large and way beyond our means. The time has come to retire the false comforts," the President said.

Courtesy; KNA