Eat, pray, legislate: Where is the change in K-P Assembly?

Both treasury and opposition continue to remain absent or tardy at sessions .

PESHAWAR:

As much as PTI likes to portray itself as different from other parties and a harbinger of ‘change’, it has failed to shake off in its MPAs a disregard for their responsibilities and the country’s ‘time-honoured’ tradition of tardiness.

Who has the answers?

On Friday, when the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly started taking up questions after yet another hour-long delay, and amid a lack of quorum, Speaker Asad Qaiser asked the treasury members to respond to a supplementary question raised by an MPA. To everyone’s disbelief, Adviser to the CM on Law and Parliamentary Affairs Arif Yousaf informed the speaker the administration department (to which the query pertained) had not informed him about the said question so he was unable to respond to it.

Yousaf maintained the department can approach any minister about questions put forward by lawmakers and it failed to do so.

Speaker Qaiser then called for disciplinary action against the responsible department officials. The matter was subsequently referred to the relevant standing committee.

The same happened when the last question on the day’s agenda was raised. The query was related to the finance department and the relevant minister was not present to respond to additional questions. Moreover, even Parliamentary Secretary for Finance Mohammad Ali did not stand up to address the query despite senior minister Inayatullah Khan nudging him. In the end, Khan asked the speaker to defer the question to the next session because of the finance minister’s absence.

These episodes led Qaiser to issue a warning to ministers to take stock of their responsibilities.

The house managed to discuss only three or four questions out of several and then at 4pm the speaker announced a 30-minute break for prayer and tea. Interestingly, someone in the press gallery quipped that the timing for call of asr prayer is 4:30pm.

Do you have the time?

If anything is a permanent feature in the house proceedings, it is the time wasted not just by treasury lawmakers but by opposition MPAs as well in delayed starts and lengthy breaks.

To be fair, the assembly has always been run this way, without any regard for value of time and the cost of a session to the public exchequer. But when PTI came into power in 2013 with a much-touted slogan of ‘change’, everyone was expecting improvement.

Ironically, in less than two years, treasury lawmakers have proved everyone wrong with their performance. In the previous ANP-led assembly, house proceedings always started an hour or so late and the speaker was always enraged at ministers’ casual disregard for the house. The same is happening now under PTI’s watch. One could argue, where is the ‘change’?

If the people responsible for changing the destiny of this province cannot let go of their habits, it is of no use to expect them to change a lot for the common man in remote villages of Kohistan, Chitral and Torghar.

Every single day, the assembly session starts an hour or more late, but no MPA feels any remorse for precious hours that are wasted of hundreds of people, including assembly staffers and media personnel. Even those lawmakers who arrive early disappear into this or that chamber for tea and gossip.

After these unnecessary delays, when the session starts with its usual question hour, relevant lawmakers do not show up, forcing the speaker to declare the question as lapsed or pending.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 22^nd, 2015.