Like we all know, the nation is in constitution amendment mode. Last week, the Senate controversially voted to reject local government autonomy, and more infamously, retain a clause on citizenship which many see as a legal validation for underage marriage.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed 85 new clauses to the 1999 Constitution (as amended), the pick of which was the rejection of immunity for the President and state governors from criminal prosecution. Here is the constitutional amendment debrief as we know it.
Immunity clause
By the new provision on immunity, the President, Vice-President, governors and their deputies will be compelled to leave office if found guilty of any criminal offence.
It was a gruelling day in the House as a total of 339 out of the 360 members of the House voted on Wednesday to pass the clauses. The voting and collation of results ended at about 10.43pm.
On the issue of immunity, 306 members voted to remove it, 17 opposed it, while 14 abstained.
The House also voted to retain four years as the tenure of office of elected officials.
Local government autonomy
293 lawmakers voted to endorse autonomy for local governments, against 39 who opposed it. Seven legislators abstained.
This development means that the House took a different position on the issue, compared to the cousins upstairs, the Senate which rejected autonomy for the councils.
Elections
The reps also voted to scrap State Independent Electoral Commissions and transferred the responsibility of conducting council polls to the Independent National Electoral Commission.
Independent candidacy was also endorsed by the House, meaning that in future, persons who do not belong to any political party, can stand for elections as individuals.
A total of 313 lawmakers endorsed the provision, with eight opposed it. Twelve abstained.
Life pensions
On this point the Reps agreed with the Senate. The House retained the controversial proposal for life pensions for the President, Vice-President, Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Deputy Speaker - 284 lawmakers endorsing the provision, with only 18 opposing it. Thirty-six abstained.
Other highlights
Other key decisions the Reps took included the transfer of health, housing, electricity and railways from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent List – implying that states can now make laws on these issues.
However, the issue of minimum wage and labour matters, sore points that civil society groups had campaigned on, were retained in the Exclusive List, the federal government retaining legislative competence on those matters.
The House also adopted all the recommendations of its report on the Peoples’ Public Sessions it conducted across the Federation on November 10, 2012.
Mechanical wahala
Lawmakers had to resort to voting manually on Wednesday as the electronic voting system failed again – the much-hyped intervention by the Nigerian Communication Satellite Company (NigComSat) to rescue the situation failed to work after a little over three hours.
The House had asked NigComsat on Monday to assist, by installing an improvised electronic voting system which made use of iPads.
The Director-General of NigComsat, Ahmed Rufai, who supervised the installation of the temporary system on Tuesday, had assured lawmakers that it would work perfectly. However, as members got set to vote on Wednesday, the system failed to work.
The manual voting which was eventually adopted, was a tedious process, involving voting by 339 seated lawmakers, collation of results and analysing the results to meet the constitutional requirement of two-thirds majority (240) to pass any proposal.
Each member voted using a document containing the 87 changes (clauses) proposed for inclusion in the constitution. Two of the clauses were later dropped, leaving 85 as passed.
Busy day at the House. No word on s.29(4)(b) as at press time.
[Photo H/T: Vanguard]