The longest serving Member of Parliament Hon Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin has said that the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) is ineffective because it is not an apolitical institution.
‘’The NDPC has not been able to give us a National Development plan because whenever there is a change of government, the head of the NDPC changes’’ he noted.
He made these assertions in an interview with Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show (HMS) on Happy FM when he was contacted to address issues pertaining to the delays of political parties in releasing their manifestos. ‘’There is no dynamism in the work of NDPC, it is a game in the hands of politicians’’ he said.
According to Alban Bagbin, there are some guidelines in the constitution to direct where Ghana stands when it comes to a National agenda, but he advocates those guidelines should become enforceable rules so that every political party will be obliged to use the National Development Plan as their working documents.
When quizzed by Samuel Eshun why parliament has not championed the national plan agenda, he said: ‘’ Parliament has not been allowed to mature, most members have served either a four-year term or eight-year term. I am the only one who has served twenty-eight (28) years as a member of parliament. The strength of every parliament is its technical knowledge and we do not have that because of frequency with which parliamentarians are voted in and out of the house” he stated.
Currently, the Director General of NDPC is Dr. Kodjo Esseim Mensah-Abrampa with Prof. Stephen Adei as the Chairman
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By: Bridget Mensah