He said the president has once before urged Members of Parliament together with the ministers to speed up parliamentary processes after they only managed to pass 3 bills and failed to submit the other 21 including the other 6 that had lapsed to parliament.
Ziyambi made the remarks during the Liaison and Coordination Committee (LCC) Retreat workshop which was held at Holiday Inn in Bulawayo to review the performance of the parliamentary committees individually and collectively during the first two sessions of the non-parliament.
Ziyambi said the president condemned the parliament for the poor performance in failing to play their roles.
“The president on officially opening the second session, he criticised the parliament’s low output of bills and challenged members, individually and collectively, to play their part in speeding up parliamentary processes. It applied to both parliament and us as ministers; we did not put much effort on those bills,” he said.
He said he puts blame on himself for the performance because most of the bills were not brought up in parliament.
“Before consideration of the challenges, reasons for the low output bills and poor performance, it has to be taken note of that the responsibility of performance of the legislative agenda lies on the doorstep of parliament and it cuts across the executive as well. Hence I am also accepting the responsibility in terms of the legislative agenda as to why some of those bills did not reach parliament,” Ziyambi said.
He said the performance of the legislative agenda during the first session can be considered from the bills outroot that is the number of bills passed, those that lapsed at the end of the session in September as unfinished business and those that never came to parliament among other bills.
Ziyambi said one of the reasons for that poor performance is because both Mps and Ministers had been redirected to focus on the cyclone Idai problem.
“Those that failed to reach parliament are because we did not bring them for parliament for purposes of them being considered, due to the problems that we had encountered in that particular time because we had cyclone and we had to divert. Majority of the ministers had to be stationed in Manicaland, Chimanimani and all these contributed to the slowness of the output of bills from the executive,” he said.
