Reps passed 88 bills in two years – Official

The House of Representatives has passed 88 bills out of 1407 bills in the past two years, its spokesperson, Benjamin Kalu (APC, Abia) has said.

The House clocked two years on June 11 and has two years left.

Mr Kalu had earlier released different data on the status of legislative activities. However, PREMIUM TIMES is yet to independently verify this latest data.

Mr Kalu had claimed that the House considered 853 bills and 41 of them passed, in the previous statement.

According to the new statement released on Friday, a total of 554 bills were introduced between June 2020 and June 2021. It was a sharp decline considering that the House introduced 853 bills between June 2019 and June 2020.

Although the decline could be blamed on the outbreak of COVID-19.

“The accurate number of bills considered by the 9th House of Representatives as of June 10, 2021 is 1407 out of which the House has passed 88 bills.

“Additionally, the accurate number of motions considered by the 9th House of Representatives as of June 10, 2021, is 730 out of which the House has made 98 resolutions on security issues.”

The data released by the lawmaker shows that while the introduction of bills has been easy, the progression of bills has been very slow.

A total of 942 bills are awaiting second reading, only 327 bills have been referred to committees, and 79 are awaiting committee of the whole consideration.

Within the same period, 730 motions were considered by the House. However, out of the 663 referred to committees, only 40 reports have been laid, and only six have been considered by the House.

Legislative activities suffered a great deal in 2020 due to the breakout of COVID-19. The National Assembly was shut down for about two months between March 2020 and May 2020.

At a point, the plenary was reduced to once a week.

However, the lawmakers did not help the situation by embarking on holidays at the slightest opportunity, thereby missing deadlines on passage of key legislation.

Also, a review of the legislative agenda of the House by PREMIUM TIMES shows that the lawmakers are far behind in fulfilling their agenda.