The librarian and Director General, Information Services, House of Commons, London, United Kingdom, Mr John Pullinger, has said that Nigeria needs a well equipped legislative library to boost its democracy.
Mr Pullinger told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in an interview, on Friday, at the closing ceremony of the National Training workshop for Legislative Librarians in Nigeria that a sound legislative library would contribute to a well-informed democracy.
According to him, “This means the legislature will be well informed about the business that comes before it… Individual members of the National Assembly (NASS) are well informed to carry out their parliamentary duties in their constituencies… The public is well informed about the importance of NASS in their national life.” He then pointed out that there was the need for the legislative library to take a leading role in democracy-wide information management activities through the indexing of materials to facilitate access to knowledge.
How brilliant an idea this would be, if only Nigerian legislators would ever make use of the library. It would be recalled recently it was recently alleged that a good number of these legislators could neither read nor write!
