A bill to replace a member of the Legislature in the event of their resignation, death, or vacancy by merely proposing a successor rather than holding a new general election to fill the vacancy was rejected by the Senate.
The National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly are included in the Legislature that is being discussed here.
The measure, which is a proposed modification to the Electoral Act, 2022, was introduced by Senator Karimi Sunday, a member of Kogi’s Kogi-West Senatorial District.
On Tuesday in Abuja, it was brought up for a second reading on the Senate floor.
The bill’s lengthy title is “A Bill for an Act to amend the Electoral Act, 2022 to allow political parties to nominate and replace candidates who have been duly elected in the event that serving members of the National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly resign, pass away, or have vacancies in their seats, and for connected matters therewith, 2023.”
The main feature of the measure is that, instead of holding a new general election to fill a vacancy, the political party whose platform the candidate ran on should just select a replacement.
Sen. Sunday led the discussion on the basic ideas of the measure, arguing that the political party should propose the successor because the party that created the candidate belonged to the votes, not the candidate.
He did, however, remark that the political party might hold a primary election to select the replacement from among those who took part in its initial general election primary.
According to Sen. Sunday, the purpose was to avoid the enormous expenses that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would have had to pay if a new election had been held to fill the position.
How come the bill is there? It’s about preventing needless expenditure for the country.
There’s no need to hold new elections when a member passes away or resigns. All that will happen is that the political party will pick a suitably qualified member as a replacement.
“A primary can be held by a political party to choose the replacement. The goal is for INEC to hold a new by-election with as little waste as possible.
“Other democratic jurisdictions, including the USA, follow this practise.”
However, the majority of parliamentarians opposed the bill, preventing it from moving forward past the second reading stage on Tuesday.
Sen. Godswill Akpabio, the president of the Senate, offered the first observation, urging the body to proceed cautiously and make sure the bill did not clash with any other provisions of the 1999 Constitution or the Electoral Act.
Furthermore, Akpabio noted that members of the legislatures in several of the areas mentioned by Sen. Sunday in the bill were appointed rather than elected.
He clarified that since it was customary in such jurisdictions, it might not be a misnomer for a vacancy to be filled by nomination.
Strongly opposing the bill, Sen. Suleiman Kawu (Kano-South) stated that Nigeria, being a presidential democracy, would not accept its proposition.
“Yes, the party is represented on the ticket, but the candidate is on the ballot. How, under a constitutional democracy, can a small group of people nominate a candidate?
Kawu informed the Senate, “This bill should be withdrawn to save legislative time.”
Sen. Opeyemi Bamidele, the majority leader in the Senate, also called attention to a few procedural mistakes in Sen. Sunday’s bill presentation.
He claimed, for example, that the bill did not come with a summary outlining its advantages and disadvantages to help senators in their contributions to the discussion.
Sen. Sunday was told to withdraw the bill, but he refused, saying the bill should go to the ad hoc committee on constitutional amendment instead.
The bill was decisively rejected by senators after Sen. Akpabio submitted it to a voice vote.
