Parliament has unveiled plans to streamline its Standing Committees to harmonise them with the rest of the Commonwealth following Rwanda’s entry into the Club.

According to the Deputy Speaker in Charge of Political Affairs, Denis Polisi, the standing committees will be trimmed from the existing eleven to nine.

 "We are currently planning to restructure the Standing Committees whereby we will introduce new committees,” said Polisi.

The current committees include; political affairs, economy and trade, science education and youth, foreign affairs and cooperation, social affairs, security and territorial integrity and one for unity, human rights and fight against Genocide.

Others are of budget and national patrimony, agriculture, livestock development and environment, gender and family promotion, petitions of the population and a committee in charge of conduct of Deputies and assessment of the Chamber’s activities.

"We have revised the internal rules and regulations including the structures of parliament; we have finalized the draft of the restructuring. However, we are waiting for the finalization of constitutional amendment so that we can approve the new structures,” Polisi said. 

 "There are many clauses in the constitution that are affiliated to the structures of the parliament that is why we have to wait for the adoption of the constitutional amendments so that we can ratify the new structures”.

He said that among the new committees to be introduced include the committee of Public Accounts that will follow up on state financial expenditures.

The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee is likely to be among the most important committees after the restructuring since it will be charged with dealing with corruption issues on a daily basis and bringing public officials to account on how they use state funds.

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Conference of Chairpersons yesterday started revising the proposed amendments of the constitution with a new approach of tackling all articles in the constitution apart from those that require a referendum.

Initially, Parliament had agreed to tackle the 58 articles proposed for amendment.

The proposed constitution amendment will scale down the articles in the supreme law from the current 203 to 191 articles.

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