NO MORE OF THOSE BUDGET DEBATES IN PARLIAMENT.
Today the 27th September 2024 the Minister of Finance has presented the National Budget for the year 2025 with the practice having been all these years that parliamentarians would immediately starts to collectively approve the different estimations of the budget and such debates being done in the parliament chamber and televised… The New Dawn Govt government working with parliament management have however changed the format to a Sector based approach which means that after this budget presentation parliament will break off into sectors and therefore for the next 20 days there wont be any parliamentary main business but that the budget will now be interrogated by committees away from the chambers.
Where as this approach is widely used one must appreciate that our parliamentary system is different from the countries from where we have copied this practice and sadly members of parliament will now be limited to the sectors they have been assigned as opposed to being given the chance to interrogate the entire budge as the practice had been before .
This therfore means that the general public will now be deprived of those interesting budget interrogatory debates through which they get to have a full and detailed understanding of what is contained in the budget.
This model means each sector will produce a report to one consolidated committee which committee will now be expected to present the final report to parliament and parliament will allow only one member or two from each political party to make remarks on the final reports …
I will personally start giving my budget analysis on this pages by next week arising from this development.