Parliament Will Turn Into "A Market Place" If- Babgin

The already overstretched Parliament House is to face more structural challenges, after the National Service Secretariat released some 230 Service Personnel to serve as Research Assistants to Members of the under-resourced Legislature. The improvised Parliament House already lacks key facilities needed in any modern Legislature. Since the rebirth of Parliamentary Democracy in Ghana some 16 years ago, MPs have been fighting for office accommodation without much success. Successive Governments have widely published the dilapidated Job 600 Building as the ultimate solution to the problem of lack of office space for MPs, but their commitments did not go beyond prescribing sound-bite solutions to the long standing problem. There are increasing concerns that the growing number of people using the building, which was not originally built to House Parliament, is more or less a disaster in the making. In an exclusive interview with Citi News, the Majority Leader, Hon. Alban Bagbin said the addition of the National Service Personnel to the already crowded building would make the situation so chaotic that parliament would begin to have management problems. He observes that until the government provides additional spaces for the Research Assistants outside the parliamentary premises, the current premises would almost be turned to a “market place”. “…from the next session (October) we are likely to have a market place here. There would be so many people walking around doing nothing; not that there is nothing to be done but there is no space to do it.” Source: Citifmonline