As one way of fostering collaboration and strengthening the role of political parties in parliamentary oversight and governance, the Democracy Works Foundation conducted training for political parties, mainly focusing on the roles of political party caucuses in parliament.
Speaking after the training, Democracy Works Foundation Regional Director Augustine Magolowondo said political party caucuses are very important because they are meant to strengthen party positions and deliberations in parliament, hence the need for the training.
He added that there is a need for coordination between political party representatives in parliament and their respective political party structures.
“The two are speaking on behalf of one institution of their political party, and the importance of that is, when you are voted as a parliamentary, you are voted there because people saw potential in you, but most likely, it is also the connection that you have with that particular party. So, in a democracy that is thriving based on political parties, you want this coordination to be visible, but also you want parliamentary to be supported by their political parties in terms of information and research so that the parliamentarian is not left alone, but also the party is not left alone,” he explained.
According to Magolowondo, they conducted the training to strengthen these institutions of parliament to make sure they work closely together in the process of improving their performance.
“Political parties are there to serve the people, so we are also improving the relevance of political parties and parliament to democracy and we are strengthening our democratic governance system in that regard,” he explained.
In his remarks, Member of Parliament for Zomba Ntonya, who is also the leader of UDF in parliament Ned Poya, said the training is very important to them as parliamentarians because they have been trained on how caucuses can conduct their businesses and how they should work with the leadership of their political parties.
“Most of the time, there is a gap between parliament and their political leadership because, as parliamentarians, we advance the policies of the party. So the parties that formulate policies are supposed to be sitting down with their MPs to advance their ideologies in parliament. So this kind of training is very important. It is an eye opener to us; it is enlightening us on how we can work together,” he explained.
One of the facilitators at the training, Henry Chingaipe, said that some studies have shown that the performance of parliament is below people’s expectations and the parliament over time is seen to be a parliament that underperforms.
“So when you look at popular data such as Afrobarometer across the period you will see that we have a significant proportion of Malawians disapproving the performance of parliament and also that is associated with a trendy in which you get movements up and down in the levels of trust that the public has in the institution of parliament. So parliamentary caucuses are important in shaping the performance of our MPs and that’s why we engaged them on the same to strengthen their performances,” he explained
Political party parliamentary caucuses are meetings that normally take place when political parties are preparing for the sitting of parliament.
Ideally, these meetings comprise members of parliament who are coming from one political party. They sit down with the leadership of the party to reflect and prepare for the parliamentary session to look at what are the issues that are coming up in parliament and then discuss the key party position.
