A fellow of Solidaire Ghana, Harry Yamson, has entreated Parliament to institute stringent measures to ensure that the public purse is protected from waste.

Speaking on Newsfile on Saturday, he noted that the House should play its watchdog role by ensuring that projects started by any government are duly completed by successive administrations.

Over the years, the leading political parties have been playing a blame game over abandoned projects.

The politicisation of projects in the country has been noted by many as contributing factor to the country’s slow pace in development.

While acknowledging the need for a regular audit of government spending, Mr Yamson urged the Parliament to build a system that will keep successive governments on their toes.

“It is parliament that must own up to protect the public purse, and that is where we are failing, and we are giving Parliament a free pass; we should end it.”

“We all understand that because government continues, and we have an institution called Parliament, there really ought to be not much need for the nature of the audit that we conduct which tend to become a means by which political persons simply reallocate the national cake from one group to another,” he said.

He added, “We don’t seem to have accepted that fiscal waste has long term developmental consequences, and so we have reduced this matter which is really a strategic issue to one of politics, but it’s not about the naming.”

He highlighted that although the current administration has completed certain projects the erstwhile administration initiated, the country suffers due to politics.

“There is an issue that we need to confront that no politician in county suffers any repercussion for touting massive expenditure on infrastructure that they know they cannot finish or for abandoning critical infrastructure.”

“Parliament is playing its role. We have built into our transitional arrangement proper law that ensures that the constitutional requirement that things began must be completed in addition to whatever vision a person has, then we would be protecting the public purse much more effectively,” he stated.