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{
    "id": 359284,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/359284/?format=api",
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    "content": "when a Committee is sitting to prosecute any matter. This is, therefore, a critical matter that we are handling. There is no opposition in this House. That is something that we really need to appreciate. Ours is not a parliamentary system like the British system for instance where you have a clear side of Government which is on the right hand side of the Speaker and an opposition that sits on the left hand side of the Chair. What we have here is a majority side and a minority side. One thing I want to stress for the benefit of both sides of this House is that oversight is our collective responsibility. It is not necessarily the responsibility of the minority side alone. Oversight is not the responsibility of the Public Accounts Committee and the Public Investments Committee alone. It is among our three cardinal responsibilities. We came here to legislate. We shall be legislating very robustly. We came here to represent the people of this country through our respective constituencies. We also came here to oversight the Executive. It is, therefore, important that we have been struggling to make this notion sink that really we share the responsibility to oversight. I believe that in whichever Committee that I will serve, at the end of the day, I will expect both the majority Members and the minority Members to collectively play the role of oversight on the Executive. Only then will we be fulfilling that cardinal constitutional mandate to oversight the Executive. Hon. Deputy Speaker, allow me to conclude by raising a matter which I believe ought to go on record. There has been this tendency by the media and even by the Senate itself to attempt to regiment the two Houses of Parliament. I say this because even as we debate the issue of Committees our sister House, the Senate is also grappling with this question of Committees. I have noted that the Senate has even proposed to create two Committees that will almost be a mirror of the two Committees that we are debating now. The Senate is proposing to constitute Committees called “County Accounts Committee and County Investments Committee.” I am saying that because there is this debate that is almost gaining momentum that these two Houses of Parliament have to be calibrated so that we know which House is upper and which one is lower, and which House is senior and which House is junior."
}