Ghana’s parliament has been urged to be more transparent by the Parliamentary Network Africa (PNAfrica).
According to leader Sammy Obeng, when the media or cameras are not there, the members appear to be working, but as soon as they spot the cameras, they all start acting in a way that will allow their supporters to see them in action.
He also wants the Ghanaian parliament to think about opening up its committees.
According to him, a number of the parliamentary committees are closed, and Ghana might “learn from other parliaments that have open committees.”
He was commenting on the most recent Index, which rated Ghana’s parliament as the best out of the 13 nations it reviewed.
According to the Africa Open Parliament Index, the Parliament of Ghana has been deemed the best (OPI).
The Africa Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations Network (APMON) and the Parliamentary Network Africa (PNAfrica) sponsored the launch of the Index (APMON).
The Index evaluated how transparent African parliaments were.
The Pan African Parliament Civil Society Forum is coordinated by the Center for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. The Africa OPI is a joint initiative with the APMON Working Group, which is made up of renowned parliamentary monitoring organizations in Africa, including the Mzalendo Trust (Kenya), Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Parliamentary Monitoring Group (South Africa), and Africa Parliamentary Press Network (APPN). Additionally, Directorio Legislativo, an Argentinean group that was a co-founder of the Latin American Legislative Transparency Index and Network roughly ten years ago, provided technical assistance.
Transparency, civic engagement, and public accountability are the three Open Parliament criteria that are used by the Index to evaluate parliaments throughout Africa.
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Sammy Obeng noted that although Ghana placed first out of the 13 nations, its score of only 63 percent was unimpressive.
He claimed that African parliaments often had “extremely low” levels of openness.
He claimed that other parliaments might visit Ghana’s parliament and learn from our experience if it were more open.
Concerning the Index
With the use of the Index, civil society will be able to collaborate with national and regional parliaments to identify structural obstacles to parliamentary openness and to jointly design changes that will increase parliaments’ capacity to improve their openness.
The Index’s justification includes:
Establish minimum criteria for evaluating the degree of parliamentary transparency in African national and regional legislative bodies.
empower parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) and parliaments to keep track of the extent to which the ideals of an open parliament are being improved; Identify and share parliamentary best practices to encourage more transparent parliamentary processes; and Utilize the collaboration between civil society and parliaments to develop parliamentary reforms, guidelines, and action plans that will help parliaments better fulfill their oversight, legislative, and representational duties.
