Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter
GOVERNMENT MEMBER of Parliament for Portland Western, Errol Ennis has voiced some grouses with the ongoing local government reform, which he claimed has sidelined MPs.
Speaking in the 2005/06 Sectoral Debate in Gordon House yesterday, Mr. Ennis charged that Members of Parliament were being sidelined under the new system.
He called for the role of parliamentarians to be reviewed to grant them greater autonomy and scope for more involvement in their constituencies.
Mr. Ennis argued that parish councillors were now enjoying greater autonomy and had access to more resources than their counterparts in Gordon House.
"With the continuing reform of the local government systems, the councillors have become the autonomous operational managers of the constituencies, " he said.
COUNCILLORS WELL FUNDED
"They are fairly well funded, they get monthly allocations and they attend to the daily needs of the people collectively and they are in receipt of financial allocations far in excess of what any MP gets," he noted.
He added that while the councillors are doing a fairly good job, the consequences of local government reform needed to be re-examined, especially as it relates to roles of the MPs within the State.
"No mayor would want to be a non-Cabinet Member of Parliament and if he did, he would be a mayor without ambition," he said.
"Mr. Speaker, we have to designate the role of the Member of Parliament to that of designing the economic and social development strategies for the constituencies," said the State Minister of Agriculture.
According to Mr. Ennis, MPs should once again be ex officio members of parish councils.
"We have to begin a process in earnest of grass roots planning. It can't be this constant planning from the top down, it has to be from the bottom up," he said.
He also recommended that the development programmes of the constituencies be approved by Parliament.
RAPS CONDUCT OF MPS
Mr. Ennis harshly criticised the present conduct of Parliament and parliamentarians and said that it was a major disservice to the hopes and aspirations of the Jamaican people.
"The chamber is about state craft and statesmanship with a little politics at times. The chamber requires statesmen for the most part, in order to optimise its service to the nation. A statesman is a politician who puts himself at his country's service, a politician, on the other hand, puts the country at his own service at all times," he said.
