July 16, 2006	Sunday	Jumadi-ul-Sani 19, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, July 15: Legislators and parliamentary experts on Saturday called for arming the legislature with knowledge and power to make its voice heard.

They said the parliament should be strong enough to make independent and effective laws with insight and input provided by the people’s representatives and the civil society.

Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Sher Afghan Khan Niazi inaugurated the seminar on “Knowledge and Power: The Connection between Public Policy, Research and the Parliament”, organized by the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and the USAID-funded Pakistan Legislative Strengthening Project at the National Library Auditorium.

The seminar aimed at strengthening the parliament of the country.

Former senator Farhatullah Babar of the Pakistan Peoples Party said the parliament was spoken of as ineffective and toothless body, but parliamentarians themselves have to be blamed for being lax in rehabilitating the legislature’s image as a powerful lawmaking chamber.

The PPP spokesman said the information contained in the Question Hour was the most important source of research material that could be used by the legislators with devastating impact in lawmaking and in agitating issues of public importance and make the parliament really powerful.

Giving examples, the outspoken and learned senator said the flaws in the oil pricing mechanism, or the grabbing of the state lands by one institution (army) in violation of the Constitution, the award of contracts without bids to certain public sector concerns, doling out billions of public funds to private concerns, and using state lands for purposes other than for which it was initially allotted such as building golf courses were all contained in the archives of parliamentary replies.

He said there was no other source from which such vital research material could be obtained except by wading through the material in the Question Hour.

For instance a commercial entity claimed to be private venture refused to appear before the parliamentary committee. But the parliament’s archives belied the claim as it had been paid billions out of public funds to bail it out of the financial crunch. The Senate archives revealed that huge lucrative contracts amounting to several billions had been awarded without bids to one or two chosen public sector enterprise.

Senator Babar said the archives of Question Hour in the Senate yielded such explosive research material that indicated that some agencies were unlawfully using state lands for purposes other than for which the land was initially allotted. He said all this and much more was available only in the archives of the questions hours of parliament and nowhere else.

The research material on the misuse of state lands had placed in the hands of members of parliament a unique opportunity to make a law as required under Article 173 (5) of the Constitution stating, “transfer of land by the federal government or a provincial government shall be regulated by law”.

It was for the MPs to make use of such material for appropriate law making, he said.

“The opposition has always been complaining about the ineffectiveness of the parliament and it being made subservient to the whims of one individual. That may be true but equally true is the fact that the MPs also have not shown much determination in making use of the research material available for influencing public policy”, Mr Babar said and asked the researchers to organize their work in such a way that made full use of the material available in the archives of the parliament itself.

He said the critical issue before MPs was not so much of lack of research material but a lack of understanding where that material was indeed available and how to collect and collate it.

He disagreed with ruling Muslim League secretary-general Syed Mushahid Husain who had said that the government was considering to implement 30 out of the 35 recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on Balochistan.

He said most critical and over 90 per cent of Balochistan problems were their reservations about the building of new cantonments and the acquisition of land by outsiders in Gwadar in the name of development.

Senator Babar said although the Mushahid committee had made recommendations about these issues but the government had flatly rejected the same. “Key to the Parliament’s power lay in knowledge, key to knowledge lay in search and key to parliamentary research in the Pakistani context lay in the question hour archives of the Parliament”, the well respected senator said.

He said truth, wisdom and knowledge lay scattered all around and was in abundance. The important thing was to lay one’s hands on the knowledge and truth that was required in any particular situations and that was the job of a researcher”.

PML secretary-general Mushahid Hussain Syed referring to the services of the Senate Foreign Relations committee said so far they had published 11 reports.