THE Fourth Session of the Seventh Parliament which ended its lifespan in November only managed to deal with four Bills out of the 23 Bills President Robert Mugabe announced would be tackled.
REPORT BY VENERANDA LANGA SENIOR PARLIAMENTARY REPORTER
Both the House of Assembly and Senate sat for 54 days and 49 days respectively out of a possible 80 that previous sessions have sat on average.
Acting Clerk of Parliament Kennedy Chokuda said the major reason why Parliament failed to sit for many days during that session was that MPs were committed to the constitution-making business.
“On average the Parliament sitting calendar can be 80 days, but for the Fourth Session of the Seventh Parliament we had legislators going for Copac outreach programmes and other issues to do with the constitution-making process,” said Chokuda.
“Generally legislators did their work as MPs and managed to bring in private members’ Bills and a lot of motions were introduced and debated,” he said.
Chokuda said committee business had also been very robust during the session as almost all parliamentary portfolio committees and thematic committees tabled more than one report before Parliament.
The Zimbabwe legislature, however, compares very unfavourably with other parliaments such as that of Canada whose sitting calendar for 2012 was 126 days.
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Zimbabwe’s current Fifth Session of the Seventh Parliament is likely to be cut short if elections are declared in the first quarter of 2013 as hinted by President Robert Mugabe.
In terms of Bills, only the Older Persons Bill, the Zimbabwe Human Rights Bill, the Electoral Amendment Bill and the Appropriation and Finance Bills were passed into Acts this year.
