Parliaments must be well resourced - Kufuor

Accra, Oct. 20, GNA - President John Agyekum Kufuor on Monday called on the African Parliamentary Union (APU) to consider how Parliaments must be well resourced to pursue good governance.

He said unless African Parliaments were well resourced with supporting staff of high calibre for research and administration, well remunerated and equipped to support Members of Parliament the targets of good governance might prove illusory.

President Kufuor made the call when delivering the keynote address at the Opening Session of the 26th Conference of the APU in Accra. Issues to be discussed at the Conference, which is under the theme: "African Parliaments for the Consolidation of Democracy" are the promotion of the role of women in the development of Africa; role of Parliamentarians in the promotion of human rights in Africa and the reinforcement of the role of democratic institutions with a view to implementing the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

President Kufuor called on the APU to also acknowledge the seriousness of good governance through the Peer Review Mechanism adopted by NEPAD whose protocol most African countries had already signed and ratified. He said Parliamentarians must come out with resolutions for the consolidation of good governance in individual countries and throughout the Continent.

"This Conference should convince Africa of the possibility of good governance within reasonable time in spite of the diverse cultures, religions, politics and races of the Continent", he said.

On the theme for the Conference, President Kufuor said it should be analysed to connote good governance as the critical factor for proper development as accepted in the developed countries.

"It would then become imperative that national Parliaments should see it as their central role to consolidate good governance", he said. Mr Peter Ala Adjetey, Speaker of Parliament, stressed the need for African nations to consolidate the democratic gains made in the last decade, develop the democratic ethic, ethos and culture and prevent a return to the dark days of autocratic and dictatorial rule by governments in many countries.

He said the APU must develop a programme to address the many hydra-headed problems affecting their performance through an aggressive Legislative Development Agenda for Africa to strengthen their respective legislatures to take on the challenges of effective law making and oversight of the Executive.

The Speaker said effective legislatures were the key to effective governance by performing important functions necessary to sustain democracy in the very complex and ethnically diverse African societies. He said democratic societies required the arena for airing of societal differences provided by representative assemblies with vital ties to the populace, adding: "Africans need legislative institutions that are capable of enacting good laws in both the political sense of getting agreement from participants and in the technical sense of achieving the intended legislative purposes."

Mr Ala Adjetey called on the Parliamentarians to re-think their strategies and work assiduously to deliver their respective countries from the entrapment and strangle-hold of poverty, corruption, preventable diseases, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and more frustratingly, the slow pace of economic development and growth experienced on the Continent.

He said he was optimistic that deliberations at the Conference would yield real and effective solutions for consolidating the democratic gains already achieved in the respective countries and would produce a working plan for African Inter-Parliamentary support in consonance with the NEPAD objectives to be effectively co-ordinated by the APU and its Secretariat.