Barely a day after Speaker of Parliament, Richard Msowoya, warned that Members of Parliament (MPs) who are absent from plenary and committee meetings, without a valid reason, will have to forfeit their allowances, the conduct got repeated during yesterday\u2019s sitting.<\/p>\n
In his communication to the House, Msowoya said the essence of parliamentary meetings, a hallmark of representative democracy, is not being achieved when a lot of MPs are absent, adding that the conduct dents the image of Parliament.<\/p>\n
He then went ahead to announce that the Committee of Chairpersons, supported by leaders of political parties represented in the Business Committee, had resolved that sitting allowances should be deservedly earned.<\/p>\n
But yesterday, we observed that during the morning sitting, more than half of the MPs were absent and this was also evident during question time as at least five questions to different ministries were pended because those who were supposed to ask them were absent.<\/p>\n
One lawmaker confided in The Daily Times <\/em>that some of his colleagues spend their time attending to personal businesses and sometimes appear in the chamber only twice the whole meeting.<\/p>\n The conduct has also sparked a debate on social media on the return of the Recall Provision with some observers arguing that by stripping the Constitution of the condition, Parliament killed its own democracy.<\/p>\n In an interview Tuesday, Country Director of Link for Citizen Empowerment and Development, Jephter Mwanza, said the biggest problem on wayward MPs is that there is no oversight body to control them.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at the way things happen in this country, there are mechanisms f o r overseeing anyone, but there is no mechanism to oversee MPs\u2019 conduct. That\u2019s where the problem begins.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are people who are absent even when they are physically present. The only thing they do is clap hands, laugh or make noise when others are contributing,\u201d said Mwanza.<\/p>\n He went ahead to suggest that there should be a representative board that should oversee the conduct of MPs so that they should be punished accordingly if they break their own rules.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Speaker and his colleagues can establish this representative board,\u201d added Mwanza.<\/p>\n He also blamed Malawians for being too passive when it comes to issues on which their action is required, saying there is need to analyse the contribution of MPs so that their actions must be laid bare.<\/p>\n People\u2019s Party (PP) Leader in the House Uladi Mussa once claimed that some MPs are absent during plenary discusions because they do not contribute anything as they cannot communicate in English which is the official Parliament language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Barely a day after Speaker of Parliament, Richard Msowoya, warned that Members of Parliament (MPs) who are absent from plenary and committee meetings, without a valid reason, will have to forfeit their allowances, the conduct got repeated during yesterday\u2019s sitting. In his communication to the House, Msowoya said the essence of parliamentary meetings, a hallmark […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26668,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26665\/revisions\/26668"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}