Minority Leader Challenges Parliamentary Clerk

...Over Missing Attendance Register

Minority Leader Alban Bagbin is challenging the Clerk of Parliament’s denial that the attendance register for 21st December last year is missing. The register contains names of Members of Parliament present in the House when the National Reconciliation Bill was passed.

The Clerk of Parliament, Ken Takyi, in an interview with JOY FM dismissed claims by the Minority Leader that the attendance register is missing. The claims about the loss of the attendance register follows threat by the NDC minority to go to court with allegations that the National Reconciliation Commission Bill was passed without a quorum.

The minority members, who had walked out of the House at the time the bill was passed are protesting its passage without the numbers needed and have called for its rejection They claim that the loss of the register appears to be a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence that less than 100 Members of Parliament passed the Reconciliation Bill.

But the Clerk of Parliament told JOY FM that the attendance register for the last sitting of the year 2001, when the bill was passed, can be produced whenever necessary. He revealed that although he has not checked whether the register was intact at the time JOY FM called him on Friday morning, he has no reason to believe that the register is missing.

Mr. Bagbin who appeared on JOY FM’s current affairs programme, Front Page, however insists that the register was nowhere to be found as at Thursday evening when he made enquiries with the Clerk. When he checked again with his office on Friday morning if it had been found, the response was in the negative.