2nd Deputy Speaker Fumes Over Committees Failure To Report On Referrals

By: Christian Kpesese

The Second Deputy Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament, Andrew Asiamah Amoako has criticised committees of the House for shirking their responsibilities in reporting to the plenary on several referrals made to them.

According to Mr Amoako who is also the Member of Parliament for Fomena, several referrals have already been made to committees but no word has been heard from them on what action they took therefore he is not able to make any further ascriptions to any committee.

The Second Deputy Speaker accordingly made a passionate appeal to the chairmen and Ranking Members of the several committees of the House to be responsive to their work.

Mr Andrew Asiamah Amoako let out his frustration on Wednesday June 19, 2024 whiles in the chair after lawmakers made contributions to two important statements, one on the need for the urgent passage of the Affirmative Action Bill and World Sickle Cell Awareness Day which were made by minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection (MP for Okaikwei South) and Member for Central Tongu, Alexander Roosevelt Hottordze respectively.

“Am unable to direct any committee to take up any matters, I am personally relunctant to do so henceforth, because there are so many directives we’ve given to committees, and none has been reported back, by way of the committees bringing their reports to the house.

So am very relunctant when called to refer any matter to a committee. So committee chairs and Rankings, am using this opportunity to ask you to work on any referral that has been given to you. I’ts important that, once a refferal has been made to your committee, you work on it and report back to us.

We have so many of them, so many of them, that we refer to committees and we don’t hear anything from it, so am making this passionate appeal to the committee chairs and the Rankings, … ” so please, lets work, either than that, we don’t see the need to make refferals to any committee”, Mr Asiamah Amoako stated.

There are currently about 700 referrals before the various committees of the House.

By: Christian Kpesese/www.eagleghana.com