The current exercise in Constitution-Making
by Dr A.C.Visvalingam
President CIMOGG-March 5, 2016, 5:44 pm
President CIMOGG-March 5, 2016, 5:44 pm
To the best of our knowledge, a few key members of the Government and their advisors have spent one year on drafting a new Constitution for Sri Lanka. However, no firm details of its contents have been revealed. Instead, interested institutions and individual citizens were asked in January this year to send in, on or before 10 February, their preferred proposals for consideration and evaluation by a 20-person Public Representations Committee on Constitutional Reforms (PRCCR). The question that immediately arises is whether PRCCR will accept only those suggestions that do not go counter to any of the mysterious provisions of the still-secret Government draft and ignore the others. If not, what are the objective criteria that the PRCCR will employ in accepting or rejecting a particular proposal?
We ourselves sent in by courier 24 copies of a 35-page proposal on 9 February and an emailed reminder on 17 February but have had no response to date (Feb. 26), which gives cause for concern as to how seriously the public’s views will be taken.
Let us now look at a topical issue, viz. the number of MPs that Parliament should have. By comparison with countries which have much larger populations, we already have too many. There are 225 MPs for a population of about 21 Million giving an average representation of one MP for every 90,000 citizens or so. At this rate, India would have to have a Parliament of over 13,000 MPs!
Regarded from another point of view, fewer than one-half of our MPs attend Parliament with anything approaching an acceptable measure of regularity. In a recent exercise designed to train our MPs on the functioning of Sectoral Oversight Committees, only 55 or so MPs had attended these very important sessions. Guided by this attendance rate, and even after introducing a considerable measure of generosity, we see that there would appear to be little or no benefit in having a Parliament of more than about 110 members.
In 2007/2008, the Organisation of Professional Associations (OPA), with the voluntary participation of in-service and retired public servants who were then holding or had earlier held high office, worked out carefully that the number of Ministries could conveniently and efficiently be limited to 25 in all. If, therefore, Parliament were to have 25 Permanent Parliamentary Committees of five MPs each, a Speaker, a Deputy Speaker and an Assistant Speaker, the total number of MPs required would only be 128.
