News:
August 22, 2017
Building a new Parliamentary Chamber is not a priority rather the focus should be on addressing the welfare of the Parliamentary staff, Kwame Mathias Ntow said in an interview with ghanamps.com.
He stated that looking at the salary levels of the staff, “they are only managing to exist, we work with them, they complain of their benefits all the time”.
“As I speak to you now, it is getting to 6:00pm, staffs are still in their offices working”.
According to the Aowin Member of Parliament (MP), it is better if the Speaker sets up a committee to look into the welfare of the workers, “as MPs and the House we cannot run without the workers everything is interrelated”.
As to whether he gets a lot of complains from the staff, he responded in the affirmative and noted that when it gets to Friday if you move around Parliament you will hear some of the staff saying, “we are going for the weekend, if you have 50 or 20 Ghana you give it to the person”.
Some of the staff come to the House with prescription of their wards, school fees and we have been paying some of these things for some of the workers, he said.
“A person working at the Speaker’s secretariat and not taking home three thousand Ghana cedis (GH 3,000), the person will be working but do you think the person will be happy?”
According to him, the Hansard Department and clerks to committees are very important because if you need a report urgently for which reason they have to work extra hours to meet your deadline, they may be reluctant because there are no motivations for the person to want to sacrifice more to help you.
As to the 15% increase across board in salary announce by the Parliamentary Service Board, “If someone is taking (GH 1,500) what will change if you give him or her 15%”.
It is just like a drop of water in an ocean, it will boost them a little but then after a year 15% of their salary what will it do, is it going to be on the basic or the gross he remarked?
Speaker, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye announced that MPs should send to the Clerk their ideas of how they want a new chamber building to look like during the recess.
“We are all aware of what happened to the chamber block some time ago when the roof ripped off water was just pouring into the chamber.
If you look at the number of years that this building has spent, I think it has been a long time they have been doing refurbishment but may be not up to the top of the roof. It was not surprising the storm took off the roof and an inconvenience was created there are a lot of things that we need to do”, he remarked.
He noted that even if they are going to put up a structure what will be the mode of funding? Is it a loan, who is going to pay, is it Parliament that is going to pay or the government of the day we have been burdened with a lot of loans.
By: Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/ghanamps.com