اخبار المغرب – وطن نيوز
اخر اخبار المغرب اليوم – اخبار المغرب العاجلة
W6nnews.com ==== وطن === تاريخ النشر – 2026-01-31 15:00:00
In light of the increasing public debate about the effectiveness of parliamentary work and the necessity of linking responsibility to accountability, evaluating the performance of the nation’s representatives is no longer an intellectual luxury, but rather an urgent democratic necessity. While the dome of Parliament is full of discussions, the “language of numbers” remains the most neutral and honest judgment to measure the real pulse of the legislative institution. From this standpoint, and to activate the media’s role in accountability and scrutiny, Hespress places the House of Representatives under the microscope of “data journalism” oversight. In this special series, we delve deeply into the archives of the legislative mandate, not to judge people, but to question performance, measure returns, and reveal with evidence and graphs what may be hidden behind resonant political rhetoric. The process of inventorying the outcome was based on calculating the number of questions officially registered in the name of each representative on the Council’s website, as it is the reference document for accountability. It is worth noting that this inventory concerns the basic questions asked, without counting the “comments” or occasional interventions and points of order during the sessions, in order to measure the “oversight initiative” that was documented and prepared in advance, and separate it from the immediate interactions. Part Two: Behind the scenes of the “Oral Questions Factory”.. From the “Inventory Tactic” to the “Refrigerator” Shock. Hespress’s talk in the previous part about the representatives whose names were not recorded with any oral questions sparked widespread controversy. Although their names were absent from “Data” questions officially recorded by the Council’s administration, a number of them appear behind the screens during the plenary sessions, taking the floor and asking sectoral questions. While some face charges of silence, representatives whose numbers broke the ceiling of expectations stand out in the data. The figures show a stark disparity in the number of questions recorded, with a small number of MPs taking the lion’s share – these are mostly heads of parliamentary teams. This “hyperactivity” is not always a purely individual effort. Much of this accumulation is due to the logic of “team work”; Team questions are often recorded with the names of team leaders or specific representatives to ensure their programming, or to ask them on behalf of their absent colleagues or those who do not have enough time. These numbers reflect a parliamentary “tactic” to exhaust the team’s time quota. This paradox raises a fundamental problem about the “question factory”: who works hard to write the oral question? Does the recorded number reflect the individual effort of the representative or the collective work of the team? The answer comes from Ahmed Al-Tawizi, head of the Authenticity and Modernity Team in the House of Representatives, who revealed to Hespress the “stock of questions” mechanism that team leaders adopt to cover the deficiency or absence of individual initiatives from some representatives. Al-Twizi explained this mechanism, saying: “As head of the team, I bear responsibility for ensuring the continuation of oversight activity. When representatives do not send questions in their names, we cannot stand idly by, so we prepare a stock of ready-made questions in the name of heading the team.” Deconstructing the puzzle of the discrepancy between data and reality, Al-Twizi added: “During the weekly meetings, we review the programmed government sectors. If the representative has proposed a question in his name, we include it, and if he does not, we resort to our inventory and give him a ready-made question to ask in the plenary session.” Thus, “a number of representatives who appear in the statements with zero questions have actually asked many questions inside the dome, but they were recorded in the name of the team or its leader, and they were given the opportunity to deliver them on behalf of the group,” Al-Twizi explains, which technically explains the appearance of the team leader with hundreds of questions “as the owner of the inventory,” while other representatives appear with no credit despite their participation in the sessions and asking questions in front of the cameras. “The author of the question” is not the “author of the question” in the same context. Muhammad Shawki, head of the National Rally of Independents, deconstructed this equation more clearly, distinguishing between the “administrative recorder” of the question and the one who actually asks it. Shoki told Hespress: “We must distinguish between the questioner and the questioner. We work with team logic, and we have a collective production of questions.” The head of the “Al-Ahrar” team explained that questions with a common content “are often recorded in the name of the team head, but this does not mean the absence of the representatives’ contribution.” He added, explaining the process of the question within the team: “The representative may contribute the idea or wording during the team meetings, and because he is interested in a specific issue or a member of a relevant committee, he is the one responsible for asking the question and holding the minister accountable, even if the question was not registered in his name at the beginning.” This “stereotyping” in the management of questions makes it impossible, in the language of numbers, to distinguish the white thread from the black. It is not possible to identify the representative who took care to prepare his question and searched in his files from the one who contented himself with reciting a ready-made paper that was prepared in the “team kitchen.” Therefore, although this logic solves the problem of time management, it dissolves individual effort in the crucible of the group, and deprives hardworking representatives of their own “legislative imprint,” while in return it gives an “umbrella of protection” for others to hide behind the activity of their teams without providing real added value. Question Exchange If “team logic” is the back-end engine for producing questions, the data reveal that this engine does not spin at the same speed for all teams. Statistics on recorded oral questions show a wide variation in “productivity,” reflecting the balance of power within the dome, and also varying strategies for “filling the stock.” The language of numbers puts the Authenticity and Modernity team at the forefront of the scene with an “astronomical” difference over its closest competitors. The “tractor” alone accounted for 38% of the total recorded questions, with a total of 5,972 questions, a number that reflects what the team leader indicated regarding the intensive “inventory” strategy. In second place is the National Rally of Independents (leader of the government coalition) with a rate of 15%, followed by the main opposition pole, the Socialist-Federal Opposition team, which scored with a rate of 14%, making it the fiercest competitor to the majority in the “registration battle.” These numbers do not only reflect the activity of representatives, but rather are a digital translation of the “proportional representation” rule that governs Parliament. Article 284 of the rules of procedure stipulates the distribution of the time frame for the sessions based on the size of the teams. Consequently, the larger teams have more space to accumulate questions to ensure that their larger time slot is covered, while the less representative teams find themselves trapped in a narrow time slot that only accommodates a small amount of questions, which explains their low registration rates. The language of numbers: a mathematical impossibility When subjecting these data to a simple mathematical process, we discover the huge gap between “recorded ambition” and “presented reality.” By dividing the thousands of recorded questions by the number of time-limited sessions (3 and a half hours per session), it becomes clear that Parliament’s absorptive capacity cannot in any way accommodate this overwhelming torrent of recorded questions. The data confirms this “arithmetical impossibility” conclusively, as statistics reveal that only 21% of the total recorded oral questions were actually answered inside the dome, while 79% of the questions remained locked on the shelves or in what might be called the “archive refrigerator.” What is interesting to note is that the teams that recorded the largest number of questions were the ones that recorded the lowest percentage of answers. For example, the Authenticity and Modernity team, despite topping the list, received answers to only 12% of its huge reserve, while 88% of its questions remained unanswered. On the other hand, we find that the smaller teams (such as the Constitutional Team) achieved high response rates (55%) because they did not adopt a stock dumping policy. The number of questions recorded by the constitutional team during the period studied does not exceed 332 questions, compared to thousands of questions for other teams such as originality and modernity. Is the question the only criterion? Despite the importance of these statistics in drawing a map of parliamentary activity, reading them in isolation from the context of “team work” may lead to unfair conclusions regarding some representatives. In response to Hespress’s question about the necessity of reconsidering the question-setting mechanism to ensure “individual accountability” for each representative and knowing “who is working and who is not working,” Muhammad Shawki refused to reduce parliamentary work to the process of “posing the question” only. He explained that the “team concept” means that the production is intellectual and collective, stressing that “the meetings are not a formality, but rather a real kitchen for discussion and formulation of topics.” The leader of the Liberal Party considered that the evaluation of the representative based on the number of questions registered in his name is a deficient evaluation, saying in a firm tone that “asking questions is only a small part of parliamentary work. There is monitoring the work of the government, there is formulating questions within the committees, and there is legislative and diplomatic work. Reducing the activity of the representative to whether he has put a question or not is a simplification that deviates from the tasks of the legislative institution.” This proposal, which reduces the centrality of the “oral question” as the sole criterion for evaluation, finds its echo in the academic analysis of the phenomenon of parliamentary work. Habib Estati Zeineddine, professor of political science at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh, believes that exercising parliamentary oversight, especially in its oral aspect, requires “a minimum level of political and technical competence,” whether it is the ability to formulate an accurate question or understand complex sectoral files. The same university professor pointed out, in a statement to Hespress, a sociological fact that cannot be overlooked, which is that “some representatives arrive at the legislative institution using a local, electoral, or interest-based representative logic, without this always being accompanied by sufficient training in the tools of parliamentary work.” This lack of training may push them to a kind of “reservation or reluctance to confront publicly” under the dome of Parliament. But Astati went on to explain that Parliament “does not operate with the logic of isolated individuals, but rather with the structural dimension,” as parliamentary teams intervene to compensate for this deficiency by “selecting specific representatives to represent it in moments of accountability, either for their experience or for their communication ability.” More importantly, the political analyst drew attention to the “hidden face” of the parliamentary iceberg, which is the nine permanent parliamentary committees, highlighting that these committees, although “less visible in the media” compared to the noisy public sessions, are “more influential in terms of content and decision-making.” Within these closed halls, legal texts are discussed in their minute details, and “precise technical control is exercised, which is difficult to reduce to the moment of oral questioning within the public session.” From the “local trap” to the “triangle of concerns,” the role of the “team kitchen” that we talked about previously goes beyond simply filling the time quota, to play a decisive pedagogical role in directing the oversight compass. Data and testimonies reveal that a large portion of the MPs’ proposals miss the title and confuse the tasks of the “nation’s representative” with the tasks of the “collective advisor,” which requires intervention to correct the course before reaching the plenary session. In a statement to Hespress, Ahmed Al-Tawizi identified this “conceptual trap” into which representatives fall under pressure from voters, saying: “The citizen holds the representative accountable with the logic of: What have you achieved for the region? So the representative is forced to try to ask purely management questions, such as constructing a watering can in a remote roundabout, repairing a sidewalk, or providing a bus.” The head of the “Authenticity and Modernity” team added that the team’s leadership intervenes here to play the role of a “brake,” explaining: “We cannot allow a question about a sidewalk to pass in a session dedicated to public policies. The parliamentarian represents the nation and not just his neighborhood. Therefore, we direct the representatives towards exercising oversight over the major trends of the state instead of drowning in local matters.” From “Irrigation” to “Water Policy.” After the representatives’ proposals were subjected to this sorting process, and the narrow local questions were dropped, the team’s filter produced for us what could be called the “triangle of daily concerns” for Moroccans, as the guns are directed towards the ministries of a direct social and service nature. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Rural Development, Water and Forests is the most accountable sector with 10%, in direct reflection of the structural drought crisis. It is directly pursued, with the same percentage (10%), by the Ministry of National Education, Primary Education and Sports, as a result of the social tension witnessed in the sector. While the Ministry of Health and Social Protection constitutes the third side of the triangle with 9%, coinciding with social protection workshops. Beyond the numbers… from “assessment of the actor” to “the effect of the action.” At the conclusion of this digital dissection of the mechanism of oral questions, Rokia Achmal, professor of public law at Mohammed V University in Rabat, puts the dots on the letters from a constitutional perspective, noting that what is transmitted on public television “only covers the tip of the iceberg.” The same university professor indicated, in a statement to Hespress, that the 2011 Constitution entrusted the House of Representatives with important tasks that go beyond momentary accountability, to include legislation and evaluation of public policies. Ashmal said that the fundamental question should not stop at the limits of statistics, but rather go beyond them to “the extent of the impact of these questions on the evaluation and improvement of public policies,” explaining that “the criterion of impact is the true scale for measuring the effectiveness of the available mechanisms, whether it is related to oral or written questions or deep work within committees.” The public law professor concluded that the real compass is not the “media appearance” of the representative, but rather “the citizen’s satisfaction with meeting his needs.” In this regard, she called for changing the angle of view, saying: “We must go beyond the logic of evaluating the ‘actor’ (the representative) to the logic of focusing on the ‘action’ (result and impact).” The post Parliament data: "The silent representatives" The cost of democracy…a numerical tally (2/4) appeared first on Hespress – Hespress is a Moroccan electronic newspaper.
