Minister Ogwang Punches Holes on Parliament Performance Scorecard

The Minister of State for ICT and National Guidance, Peter Ogwang has pointed at parameters potentially impacting on the outcome of the recently released Parliament performance scorecard.

Speaking to journalists on Friday, Ogwang, a former Commissioner of Parliament, said a number of important parameters were left out as the African Leadership Institute only focused on plenary sittings.

“I have looked at the African Leadership Institute and realized that they ranked best performing MPs in plenary are actually committee chairpersons who present work on the floor of Parliament on behalf of the committee members,” said Ogwang.

He notably stated that the activities at Parliament are not only based on plenary sittings and in some occasions Speaker send members to assignments in the field or outside country.

“For AFLI to base their research on just plenary is unfortunate because plenary can sit at a time when Speaker has given some MPs permission to travel abroad for official duty or to the field for committee work,” he said.

Foreign Affairs Minister Sam Kutesa and his junior Henry Okello Oryem were ranked among the worst.

According to Ogwang the two are always handling the country’s foreign relation matters and it is unfair to expect them to always be at Parliament.

“Take for example giving honorable Sam Kutesa and Okello Oryem the worst. Honestly the two are ever busy working on our relations with neighbors, regional and other countries and you cannot expect them to frequent Parliament,” he added.

He stressed that AFLI also lacked capacity to comprehensively research on the activities of the institution of Parliament.

“They need to improve on the methodology for proper results. For example, should every MP be captured on Hansard as having spoken simply because they stood up to say point of order?” he asked.