General News of Thursday, 22 December 2016

Source: kasapafmonline.com

We are not dragging our feet on RTI bill – Minority

Dominic Nitiwul, Deputy Minority Leader Dominic Nitiwul, Deputy Minority Leader

The Minority in Parliament has rejected claims by the majority caucus that it is not showing political will towards the passage of the Right to Information (RTI) bill.

The Majority caucus yesterday [Wednesday] accused the minority side of dragging its feet in the consideration of the remaining amendments left to be worked on before passage of the substantive bill.

The Majority say there is a deliberate attempt by many MPs on the minority side to deny the house of the needed quorum to transact business matter relating to the bill when it convened Tuesday.

But Deputy Minority Leader, Dominic Nitiwul,has rubbished such allegation insisting they’re most committed to passing the RTI Bill.

Speaking in an interview with Accra-based Citi FM, Mr Nitiwul said: “We are all committed to passing it. Every single member of Parliament is committed to passing the Right to Information bill. As a party and as a caucus, we are one of the few people who want it passed. We thought that even by this time, we should have passed that Bill.”

He continued: “There are clauses in there that we think are problematic. One of them is the implementation because the majority, thinking they would win the election, decided to push the implementation to five years from today. It was one of the issues we said no to. So there are some pertinent issues we need to agree on before we will pass it as it is.”