MPs have failed Ghanaians - Mornah

The newly elected National Chairman of the People’s National Convention (PNC), Bernard Mornah has chastised Parliamentarians for failing to scrutinize policies and deals placed before them for approval.

He said it is important to find out whether or not members of the country’s legislature are overburdened with their assigned tasks or are only interested in participating in committee meetings for the purposes of getting sitting allowances.

“We should look critically at the issues that affect our government – do they really sit down to look at the details? Are they overwhelmed or just that because there is the opportunity to sit in on a committee and get some allowances, they move from this committee and jump onto the next thereby denying the citizens the opportunity of getting good deals and good laws?” he asked.

The Ministry of Power, together with Parliament have come under fire after a Norwegian newspaper, Verdens Gang (VG) published an article suggesting that Ghana’s $510 million deal with the AMERI Group LLC for the supply of gas plants towards solving the protracted energy crisis was fraudulent.

The newspaper’s publication suggested that Ghana could have purchased the gas plants at about $220 million with an outright purchase and wondered why the country offered to pay $290 million more than the standard price on a build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) agreement.

Speaking on Radio Gold on Saturday, Mr. Mornah argued that MPs “actually do not take time to go through any of these things that come to them because they belong to more than one committee in Parliament so there is the tendency to go and just pen down their names at a committee meeting and move to the next.”

“When this happens, they do not have the opportunity to study the documents that are brought before them to find out the details.”

He added that “sometimes there are laws that are passed that Members who were in the House are not even aware that these are the laws that they passed.”