Muntaka Mubarak
National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament(MP) for the Asawase Constituency and Minority Chief Whip has lamented the lack of commitment to duty by some MPs, indicating that some of them come to parliament for just about 10 minutes and leave while others absent themselves for days on end, demanding that the number of MPs be reduced from 275 to 200.
Speaking to Luv FM in Kumasi recently, the legislator called for a biometric system to check attendance fraud where MPs hire staff to sign them in as present when there are absent and sometimes even outside the country.
“Some of our MPs are not doing the work they were elected to do. Sometimes you have people just walk in and walk out; some don’t pay attention to the details when it comes, simply because their attention is somewhere…”
“If I had my way, I would have said that let us reduce the constituencies to 200 and the other 75 we leave it for the political parties based on the results that we get from the election. Then we have a strict criterion, for example, minimum education will be a degree, experience of not less than 15 years, etc so that a certain caliber of people from the political parties can be decided on. Then these people become the third component or better still use it for affirmative action,” he suggested.
Odekro, a non-profit parliamentary monitoring organisation, has consistently complained about the absenteeism of Members of Parliament and the inactivity of some of them.
