Speaker denies blocking Chogm report

The debate on the Speaker of Parliament, has dismissed accusations that he participated in blocking debate on the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) report.
Speaking to Daily Monitor on phone yesterday, Mr Edward Ssekandi said the debate on the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chogm report would be dictated by priority of order of business in the House.

He was responding to attacks by some politicians and civil society activists last week that he scrapped the Chogm report off the agenda of the House due to pressure from the Executive, whose key members are implicated in the misuse of billions of tax payers’ money during preparations for the Commonwealth meeting.

PAC chairman Nandala Mafabi told a gathering of the National NGO Forum dubbed the “Citizens’ parliament” at Hotel Africana last week that the Chogm report, tabled in May, had been “mysteriously scrapped off” the order paper of the House.
Some other speakers accused Mr Ssekandi of being an accomplice in the conspiracy to block the report.

The Citizens’ parliament subsequently passed resolutions among which it called for urgent debate of the report and the President to sack all those implicated and prosecute culprits.

Priority
But Mr Ssekandi said: “Parliament handles business according to priority, and according to the law, government business takes priority. Currently it is the budgeting process that is a priority. The budget is finance and this is the life blood of the country. So we can’t handle anything else before we finish the budget process.”

On a challenge that he refused to honour an invitation to appear on the Citizens’ parliament to give his side of the story, Mr Ssekandi said: “I wrote to those people explaining that I am the Speaker of the House and it would be wrong for me to go engage in such drama about the report before the House which I preside over debates the same.”