The parliamentary watchdog on the foreign ministry, considered the worst performer since the Awami League-led coalition took over in 2009, is set to meet today, for the first time in over a year.
The standing committee is set to address the state of overseas employment, amid frustration of members, mainly parliamentarians of the ruling Awami League.
The 10-strong body’s newly appointed chairman, AL MP Begum Nilufer Zafar Ullah, told the Dhaka Tribune that she would work to make the committee effective.
Expressing his frustration over the committee’s stagnancy, its member Imran Ahmed said on Monday: “I will of course raise the committee’s inertia during the meeting on Tuesday. We should have performed better. I am really fed-up with its performance.”
The inaction of the committee also violates the Rules of Procedure of parliament, which requires watchdogs to meet on a monthly basis. But the body on the foreign ministry has had only 14 meetings since 2009, the last one on April 19 last year.
The procedure requires them to have had at least 50 meetings in the period.
Their contemporary bodies for public accounts, law and finance met 120, 60 and 56 times, respectively.
“I do not know what the previous chairman has done, but I want to make the committee vibrant,” Nilufer Zafar Ullah, who was going to chair the meeting for the first time, told the Dhaka Tribune.
“We will discuss the overseas employment at tomorrow’s meeting [to be held in the parliament building],” she said.
Parliamentary records show that the committee, previously headed by the current Disaster Management Minister Abul Hassan Mahmud Ali, has been inactive since its formation.
Sources said Mahmud, a former ambassador, set raising benefits of foreign service officials as the key agenda topic at all of the meetings, setting aside many important issues of the foreign ministry that were raised by member MPs.
Even the treasury bench had not reconstituted the body as required, after the former chief was made the disaster management minister in September last year.
On February 6, parliament reshuffled the committee by electing Nilufer Zafar Ullah as chairman. No action from the Speaker
The Rules of Procedure also authorises the Speaker to arrange meetings of any watchdog which fails to hold regular meetings, but no such action was taken by the Speaker.
Even the lone opposition representative at the committee AM Mahbub Uddin Khokon did not urge the Speaker to convene a meeting of the committee.
“On multiple occasions, I asked the chairman to hold the meeting regularly, but the ministry and the chairman did not pay heed,” Khokon told the Dhaka Tribune.
Such precedence was last seen during the past tenure of the BNP-led parliament, when AL MP Mohammad Nasim sent a letter to the then Speaker Muhammad Jamiruddin Sircar urging him to call a meeting of the parliamentary standing committee on the home ministry. Sircar asked the then chairman of the standing committee Mohammad Shahjahan to hold a meeting.