Speaker Alban S.K. Bagbin has reminded members of Parliament that the House is for brain and not brawn and charged leadership to show the way.
Brawn, he said, does not belong to the floor of Parliament but another arena and lamented there is too much anger and fury in the Chamber of the House and urged members to continue to jaw-jaw in decency.
According to him, it should not be the rule that every day the heat in the country is rather generated by Parliament and not from actions outside.
Advising the House on Friday after complaints by members that media publications about what transpired in the House the day before were wrong, Hon. Alban Bagbin stated the media got its reportage wrong because even members got it wrong during the debate on the Report of the Special Budget Committee on the 2023 budget estimates of the Electoral Commission.
The House also considered a report of the Committee on a briefing session on the draft public elections (registration of voters) regulations, 2022, and other related matters.
The House subsequently adopted the reports but some media houses reported that Parliament had adopted the proposed controversial Constitutional Instrument (CI) of the EC seeking to make the Ghana card the only source document for citizenship for the purposes of registering for the 2024 election.
This followed a sudden suspension of the Committee of the Whole for a briefing by the EC on the proposed CI due to the absence of the Chairperson of the EC, which sparked a confrontation among the MPs.
The Speaker warned that the legislator is very fragile and urged members to be very careful in how they conduct business.
“So this morning when you were talking about the fact that the media got it wrong; they got it wrong because a number of you, during debates of the reports, also got it wrong so how do you blame the media for getting it wrong,” he questioned.
Speaker Bagbin, however, extolled the quality of MPs of the 8th Parliament and insisted this is one of the best Houses the country has composed since Ghana reverted to constitutional rule.
He said, “I have been here since 1993 and this is one of the best houses that we have composed as a country. Your quality is very high and you are very articulate and well-informed. The only thing is how to calm your nerves.”
Parliament, he said, is the only hope to sustain Ghana’s democracy and should therefore not be allowed to collapse and stressed, “ Africa is looking up to Ghana and we cannot afford to fail them.”
