The Director General, National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, NILDS, Prof. Abubakar O.Sulaiman has disclosed that the Institute had commenced needs assessment of members of the National Assembly with a view to design training programme for them and their legislative aides.

Prof. Abubakar Sulaiman stated this yesterday at the end of a three-day Capacity Building Workshop for Legislative Aides of the National Assembly in Abuja.

He said: “As an Institute, we have embarked on needs assessment of the legislators and their pool of workforce in order to specially design training programmes/modules for enhancing the capacity needed in our legislative system.

The NILDS DG stressed the need to upscale the level of expertise and professionalism in the legislative system to conform to international best practice.

He charged the legislative aides to commit yourselves to innovation through research by identifying problems and proffering solutions and also by initiating ideas for legislation.

He said: “Despite the enormous contributions made by legislative aides in supporting the work of the legislature, the knowledge gap to achieve optimal performance is still relatively wide.

“This state of affairs can only change by constant training and retraining, and our Institute will not relent in bridging the knowledge gap for effective service delivery to the legislative arm of government.”

According to him, the just concluded training programme was in line with the vision of the leadership of the 10th National Assembly to strengthen a professional workforce at all levels of National Assembly administration.

He therefore urged the participants to have it behind their minds that their  support services  to the smooth and effective functioning of the 10th Assembly can not be overemphasized.