By Iddi Yire
Accra, July 16, GNA – Speaker Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin on Tuesday debunked media reports that a Bill on the use of sirens by Members of Parliament (MPs) has been laid before the House.
“Starting from yesterday, I heard some news that there is a Bill in Parliament trying to give Members of Parliament (MPs) sirens and also no speed limits. I mean, this social media thing.”
“There is nothing like that before Parliament,” Speaker Bagbin said in a keynote address at the opening of a Town Hall Meeting Public Lecture on the Private Member’s Bills in Ghana at the University of Ghana, Legon.
The meeting was organised by the Parliamentary Network Africa (PN Africa), in collaboration with the Students’ Parliament of the University of Ghana.
“And so I thought maybe something was being done behind me; so, I started calling all over, and all my directors said no, they haven’t seen anything like that,” he said.
“I have the responsibility of admitting many of these Bills, sometimes they may elude me, but I haven’t seen such a bill.”
The Speaker noted that he was later told it was a Legislation that Parliament was amending; saying “We don’t amend Legislations. We don’t have the power by the Constitution to amend Legislations or Instruments……I just told the people that no, no, as for that one, it can’t be true; because Parliament cannot amend (Legislations).”
Speaker Bagbin said the Constitution had delegated the power to amend Legislations to other bodies.
He said when such constitutional bodies brought an instrument before the House, be it a Legislative Instrument (LI) or a Constitutional Instrument (CI), if out of hundred provisions, the House disagreed with one, they were not even allowed to amend that one.
They (Members of Parliament) either had to throw out all the hundred, or they allowed it to pass, he said.
He reiterated that the framers of the 1992 Constitution made sure it was impossible for MPs to throw a Legislation out by insisting that they must have two thirds of majority votes to do that.
He said in a bipartisan Parliament like the current one, it was almost impossible to get two-thirds Majority to vote against an instrument, particularly because of the fundamentals of politicians; not only in Ghana but many countries.
So far, he only succeeded in getting Parliament to throw out an instrument, when he was the Chairman of the Parliamentary Subsidiary Legislation Committee in 1994, which Instrument came from the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
“Since then, nothing like that has happened,” he said.
The lecture was to discuss Private Member Bills Regime and proffer proper solutions for the way forward.
Participants came from the University of Ghana, Accra Technical University, University of Media Arts and Communication (UniMAC) and Ashesi University.
GNA