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3-hour budget reading is ‘pure torture’ - Sam Pee Yalley

Mr. Pee Yalley said the practice where the Minister of Finance is made to stand infront of Parliament for three continuous hours is very “unproductive.”

 

Government has been advised to consider creative ways of presenting the annual budget to Parliament.

Ghana’s High Commissioner to India, Sam Pee Yalley who made this suggestion said this will help Parliamentarians to strictly follow the presentation in order to make meaningful inputs.

Contributing to a discussion on Radio Gold’s Alhaji and Alhaji on Saturday, Mr. Pee Yalley said the practice where the Minister of Finance is made to stand infront of Parliament for three continuous hours is very “unproductive.”

“Can we have a better way of presenting the budget? The days where we had to virtually read everything with somebody standing for three hours is becoming very unproductive,” he said.

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On Friday, the Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper presented government’s 2016 budget to Parliament. The annual practice lasted for three hours and according to Mr. Pee Yalley, the process must be changed.

He described the practice as “pure torture,” adding that after the first hour, Members of Parliament and the listening “had lost concentration so I think that we should find a better way of presenting the budget.”

He acknowledged that he is unsure of the constitutionalities attached to the annual reading of the budget but he however maintained that it is imperative for Ghana to have “a better way of presentation because whether we received it before he read it or he gave it at the time of reading, it is the same content so I think we should reduce the human torture aspect of it and also to get people to concentrate.”

He remarked that due to the length of time involved in the budget reading, people easily lose concentration.

“I saw that after some time, people had stopped writing and I expected that the government policies will be mentioned earlier but it was at the tail end of it that I heard it and by then, a lot of people were tired,” he said.

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