National Assembly Yet to Constitute Harmonisation Committee on the Electoral Bill

It will be recalled that different versions of the Electoral Bill 2021 were passed by both houses of the National Assembly at the end of July 2021, before the long summer recess commenced. They however failed to constitute their harmonisation teams that would have met to resolve the differences in the two versions of the Bill passed by the houses. This owed to the fact that both houses concluded their session just on the day before their recess commenced. There had been worries over some of the differences in the versions of the two houses. The Senate had passed its own version of clause 52 of the bill that requires the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to seek the approval of both the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the National Assembly before deciding on the use of technology in transmission of election results. The House of Representatives in its own version of clause 52 gave INEC the power to make this decision. The Senate version of the Bill has elicited widespread national condemnation for what is described as constitutional breach of the powers of INEC to be independent. Nigerians expect that the Senate’s gaffe would be corrected during harmonisation and that the House version would be adopted to conform to the Constitution.