Advertisement

Outgoing Rwanda parliament outlines achievements in past 5 years

Friday August 23 2013
RW parl

Members of Parliament during a past session. Photo/Cyril Ndegeya

Rwanda’s Members of Parliament have been criticised for not living up to the expectations of the public. Five years later the outgoing legislators leave no legacy different from the one they inherited in 2008.

When they got into office, legislators found contentious issues that needed their immediate attention.

Among these were regional instability especially the DR Congo political saga that fuelled endless insurgency; land ownership disputes in Rwanda; law enforcement and issues around citizen representation.

Experts are of the view that the incoming legislators no doubt will inherit the same nature of work, pressure and challenges, unless more sophisticated means and strategies are found to change that status-quo.

According to Rose Mukantabana, the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, parliament managed to perform at least 96 per cent of its required duties using a balanced benchmark.

The parliament is bicameral with a chamber of deputies and senators with different mandates and timelines.

Advertisement

Currently the upper chamber of parliament has come to serve three years from a seven year-term, similar to presidential term, the current senate sworn in back in 2010 and will go up to 2017.

On the other hand the lower chamber can be dissolved anytime from now by the president, as they have wound up a five-year-term since October, 2008.

According to the Rwandan Constitution, members of the chamber of deputies shall be elected for a five year term; meaning they should vacate the premises by October 5. However, the Constitution further states that, in order to organise elections, the President of the Republic shall dissolve the Chamber of Deputies at least 30 days and not more than 60 days before the expiry of its current members’ term of office.

At a recent press conference the Speaker said parliament has passed 349 laws, of which 312 were published in the national gazette and the remaining 37 are to be published soon.

“However, as we close, around 13 Bills are pending and we have sent back to the government 24 Bills for possible modification, on top of the five we have received that await discussions,” Ms Mukantabana said.

READ: Rwanda Parliament passes new law on maternity, sick leave

The speaker also stated that in terms of holding the government accountable the Prime Minister has appeared before the plenary six times and presented to legislators the status quo of different sectors from agriculture to economy, education, mining, energy and social protection.

“We have summoned respective ministers on different occasions and they have reported more than 14 times at plenary sessions and numerous times in respective committees,” she added.

Although the outgoing MPs were heavily criticised for not having adequately engaging the community, the speaker defended her colleagues saying parliament had done its best to reach and or speak on behalf of the people.

“We have conducted up to 3,000 community outreaches, exclusive of other programmes that connected MPs to people like Umuganda (Communal Work); and I can’t understand why there is this perception that we did not reach the community,” she said.

The speaker added that in the chamber of deputies, they received close to 324 petitions from the public and they have tried their best to have them solved.

Amongst the challenges noted by the speaker are badly drafted laws on which MPs had to spend extra time for modifications, she also talked about the house being understaffed and the public which remains ungrateful.

Throughout their tenure the MPs had to debate on contentious issues mainly on sensitive laws and other issues that affected directly the public.

Some of the most critical laws included abortion articles from the adopted penal code law; genocide ideology law, media bill, cremation, phone tapping bills and the law banning public demonstration.

Also were different auditor general’s reports that had to go through parliamentary committee in charge of public accounts and other reports meant to see how tax payers money were used for the benefit of the people.