News:
August 12, 2025
Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament Rt. Hon Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin has commended both the Majority Leader Mahama Ayariga and Minority Leader Alexader Kwamena Afenyo-Markin of the substance they are made of as parliamentary leaders.
This, he said, makes his work easier. He, however, was quick to point out that the only challenge he has is how to mold them to work together in the ninth Parliament.
The Speaker stated this when he opened the 11th Biennial conference of the Commonwealth Hansard Editors’ Association, Africa region – a weeklong programme in Accra under the theme, “Charting the future of hansard: embracing innovation and technology for enhanced parliamentary reporting in Africa”. 
According to him they do their best to work together over ninety percent by building consensus but on few occasions, there were disagreements because the work of hansard is not so contemporaneous in the public domain.
“The picture is painted as if we are always at war with each other; you see how critical your work is and why we should be with you all the time and I have been with you since January 1993, and for the parliament of Ghana I can give testimony as to how your department has developed up to date and recalled in 1993 how we sent the first personnel to study outside in the United Kingdom, India and all over”.
That is how we started, and I am happy to have you here and to let us go a little bit of history of your work and how we have been struggling to catch up with the fast pace of parliamentary evolution and global governance, he added.
He stated that as chairman of the conference of Speakers in Africa in his second term, “I have been trying to develop our work in Ghana. We have had challenges because many institutions outside parliament do not understand parliament. There have been various attempts to have E-Parliament and for us to upgrade our technology to assist the hansard office in its work.
And how the world bank and others outside parliament and some ministries decided to contract some contractors to work for them and it did not work, because the system they use in Europe Is different from the system we use in the commonwealth.
So, when they tried to put that technological system in our parliament it failed. We have some challenges, and we are still going through hope; we will resolve them sooner than later. We have put in a request that this thing be left for us in parliament to do not ministries to dictate to us what to do”.
Again, the hansard department is doing what the general public service operates; this is how it is always done and that is how it should be done. You are part of public service but you are different from the public service. Your work is different from the public service, and these are some of the arguments I use for our parliament for us to have different sets of conditions of service.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com