The Executive Director of the African Center for Parliamentary Affairs, Dr Rasheed Draman has expressed worrying sentiments at the Minority’s decision yesterday to walkout on the approval debate for four deputy minister nominees.
The Minority Members of Parliament walked out on Wednesday June 23 during the debate to approve the nominees. They said they were not present during the vetting of these nominees on June 11, 2021 due the Green Ghana initiative which required Ghanaians to plant five million trees on the day to mark International Forest Day.
But speaking to Dzifa Bampoh on 3FM’s First Take, the legislation expert said though some of the actions of the minority are justifiable, the walkout that occurred was not a good thing and rather a waste of resources.
“On this very important and sacred duty of making sure that we have, um, you know, the right people that we are going to entrust with our resources to ran our country for the next four years, um, we should not be seeing walkouts and I think whatever the case is, we have to find a way to ensure that everybody is on board because the country’s resources are neither a National Democratic Congress nor New Patriotic Party’s resources,” he said.
He added “Maybe if what we have seen in the last six months, some of the events within the committee, if they were such that we have seen some changes or some withdrawals of certain nominees either by the president or the Vetting Committee because of the kind of regulations that were made at the level of the Committee, I would have said maybe a re-vetting would have been useful and produce some results…I don’t think that re-vetting will produce any outcome that will be quite different, it will just be some kind of a political process.”
The four deputy ministerial nominees are Techiman South MP Martin Adjei-Mensah Korsah, for Local Government and Rural Development, Lariba Zuweira Abudu, for Gender, Children and Special Protection, Amidu Issahaku Chinnia, for Sanitation and Water Resources, and Diana Asonaba Dapaah, for the Justice.
Dr Draman proposed the vetting process in our Parliament be centralized where for instance the Education Committee be allowed to vet the Education minister nominee and the Health Committee vet the Health minister nominee to prevent loosely approving less qualified individuals to occupy and man our ministries.
By Kabah Atawoge |3news.com|Ghana