Parliament needed the ‘Bagbin-type’ to keep the House – Chief of Staff

Kofi Attor, a founding member of the NDC and Chief of Staff at the Office of the Speaker, has observed that the eighth Parliament required the leadership and experience of Speaker Alban Bagbin to ensure the legislature performs its functions creditably.

The Eighth Parliament has been described as a ‘hung parliament’ because, for the first time, the two political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), after the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections had 137 apiece with one independent MP, the Second Deputy Speaker Andrew Asiamah Amoako.

However, the Second Deputy Speaker decided to pitch camp with the NPP to do business in the Eighth Parliament.

The Fomena MP, who had won the seat on the ticket of the NPP in the 2016 elections, went as an Independent Candidate in 2020 and retained the seat.

Additionally, it is the first time in the Fourth Republic that the Speaker of the House is from the opposition party.

The Speaker’s Special Aide, Mr Attor speaking on Accra-based JoyNews Channel on Monday, noted, amongst other things, that the NDC has played its part in shaping Ghana’s democratic development.

Responding to how Mr Bagbin has fared as leader of the legislative arm of government, Mr Attor said, “I think he’s done very well. We needed a person like him to keep the parliament that we have.”

This, he said, is because of Mr Bagbin’s experience, saying, “That man stayed in there for 28 years so he knows the very history, which we all started together.”

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“But after three terms some of us left the parliament, he stayed on, he knows the people individually, he knows the rules, he knows what is good [for the legislature].”

He continued, “Apart from sitting and ruling that you all see, several things have happened in Parliament behind the scenes about the welfare of the workers, about creation of new structures [and] about the fact that Parliament did not have too many people to rely on..We were relying on ourselves as MPs even to do budget.”

Touching on the NDC’s achievements as a social democratic party, the former NDC MP for the Ho Central Constituency indicated that the NDC ensured a substantial reduction in schools under trees and the expansion of the National Health Insurance Scheme introduced in 2003.

“We have done a lot more for education than anybody else… national health insurance before we came back was mutual, was district you cannot use your card from your village to my village. So we came and gave meaning to it. Even school feeding, these were schools in Accra, Kumasi, and big towns.. we came and sent it to the masses. We took it and sent it to the masses…We tripled those figures,” he stated.

Meanwhile, the flagbearer and leader of the NDC, John Dramani Mahama has called on party members to “rekindle the commitment to the values of unity, stability and development”.