News:
August 8, 2018
Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu is lamenting over high attrition rate in Parliament and have said it has accounted for the weak Parliamentary committees in Ghana.
According to the Parliamentary Affairs Minister, out of the one hundred and sixty nine (169) legislators the Majority has, eighty-nine of them are new members, he lamented.
“How can we be inflecting such a danger to ourselves every four years we have such a huge number of new members”, he said.
Mr. Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu called on the two major political parties with representation in Parliament, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to do some retrospection.
“You don’t grow a Parliamentary democracy that way that is why Parliament is the weakest of the three arms of government”, he lamented.
He added that any research would reveal that the average time an MP in Ghana’s Parliament stay in office is not more than two terms, “new MPs come and their capacity have to be built”.
When new MPs are learning the rules of the House, someone out there in his or her constituency is doing his or her best to bring the incumbent MP down, working to take over from the MPs, “it does not happen anywhere except Ghana”.
The media should help us educate, “our people on this issue”, to the extent that when we keep doing this we keep weakening Ghana’s Parliamentary democracy, he added.
By: Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/ghanamps.com