Hung Parliament has made Legislature less efficient – First Deputy Speaker

The First Deputy Speaker of Par­liament, Joseph Osei-Owusu, has urged the citizenry never to vote for another hung Parliament in the future because the current legislature is less efficient as com­pared to the seventh Parliament.

He called on them to vote massively for either the New Patriotic Party (NPP) or the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the 2024 general elec­tion to give one political party an overwhelming majority in the House.

“The seventh Parliament, for instance, passed more than 100 laws but the current Parliament which is in its third year has passed less than 10 laws due to the lack of effective and efficient collaboration in Parliament which is adversely affecting governance in the country,” Mr Osei-Owusu bemoaned.

Citing the approval of minis­terial nominees and nominees to the Supreme Court as an example, he was worried that there was less cooperation and the Minority tended to oppose almost all the government’s decisions irrespec­tive of the substance of issues.

According to Mr Osei-Owusu, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bekwai in the Ashanti Region, the hung Parliament was affecting governance generally and stated, next time Ghanaians should vote more for either the NPP to be the Majority, they should give them more votes and if they want NDC to be the Majority, give them more votes since the current situation was affecting governance badly.

“The seventh Parliament, probably because of the numbers, passed the highest number of laws since 1993, we passed more than 100 laws but the current Parliament is our third year, but I doubt we have passed even 10 laws due to low level of coopera­tion that I saw is no longer there,” he noted.

Mr Osei-Owusu was worried in the next two or three Parlia­ments,“if the conduct of young MPs were not checked by leader­ship of their parties, the Chamber of Parliament would turn into a boxing arena.

“Political parties who have representations in Parliament have failed to groom young ones for leadership roles hence the brawls seen on the floor of the House because the level of decorum when he entered Parliament com­pared to the current situation was not the same which needed to be changed to maintain decorum in the House.

Speaking on the number of young people who have picked the parliamentary forms of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and other political parties yet to open nominations, in an attempt to get into Parliament, the First Deputy Speaker pointed out that, sometimes the political parties even recruited people who had not demonstrated they had the intellectual and social capacity to be public officers.