{"id":1516,"date":"2020-06-16T13:23:55","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T13:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/?p=1516"},"modified":"2020-06-16T13:25:37","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T13:25:37","slug":"house-of-reps-holds-public-hearing-on-infectious-diseases-bill-passes-revised-2020-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/house-of-reps-holds-public-hearing-on-infectious-diseases-bill-passes-revised-2020-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"House of Reps Holds Public Hearing On Infectious Diseases Bill, Passes Revised 2020 Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Public Hearing on the\u00a0 controversial Control of Infectious Diseases Bill held on the 10<sup>th<\/sup> and 11<sup>th<\/sup> of June, 2020. Among several groups that made submissions on the Bill, was the Nigeria Governors\u2019 Forum, headed by Governor Kayode Fayemi. The Forum proposed that State and Local Governments should retain powers to make regulations in times of public health emergencies as contained in the Quarantine Act, and also proposed the establishment of State Centres for Disease Control to improve co-ordination with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). The National Human Rights Commission in its submission, highlighted the use of force, loss of privacy and medical rights, and the use of stigmatising terminologies in some clauses of the bill. The Association of Nigerian Pathologists which asked that the bill should be stepped down, criticised the power to compel medical treatment and questioned how the financial implications of mandated medical investigations would be addressed. Some religious groups demanded that the bill should be rejected. They argued that some clauses of the bill are unconstitutional while some others seek to give overreaching powers to the NCDC, which conflict with religious beliefs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It would seem that observers recognise the need\nfor a bill to address public health concerns. However, the Control of\nInfectious Diseases bill which seeks to amend the obsolete Quarantine Act has\nloopholes that need to be addressed to make it more comprehensive, effective\nand consistent with human rights provisions. Some of the other criticisms of\nthe bill have also been identified by human rights groups. These include: wide\ndiscretionary powers of the Director General of the NCDC, potential\ninfringement of existing human rights safeguards, criminalisation of failure to\ntake vaccines, over reliance on criminal sanctions to enforce public health\norders, little review process for aggrieved persons, potential loss of income\nfrom trade following restrictive public health orders, compulsory treatment\norders, mandatory disclosure of health information, among others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In another development, both chambers of the\nNational Assembly passed the Appropriation Act (Amendment) Bill 2020 with total\nexpenditure increased from N10,594,362,364,830 to N10,810,800,872,072. The\nHouse of Representatives passed it on June 10 and the Senate did same the\nfollowing day. Statutory Transfers which had been cut down by the Federal\nGovernment in the revised budget were increased to reflect the adjustment in\nthe benchmark price of crude oil from $25 to $28, and the corresponding rise in\ngovernment revenue. This amounted to a total increase of N5,256,207,430 in the\nallocation of some statutory agencies, moving the total Statutory Transfer sum\nin the budget from N422,775,979,362 to N428,032,186,792. The National Assembly also\nincreased recurrent expenditure for resident doctors by N4billion, bringing the\ntotal recurrent non-debt expenditure in the budget to N4,942,269,251,934 from\nN4,938,269,251,934. In addition to passing the amended budget, the House of\nRepresentatives also approved the Federal Government\u2019s loan request of\n$5.513billion, to finance the 2020 budget deficit, which had earlier been\napproved by the Senate. <\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Public Hearing on the\u00a0 controversial Control of Infectious Diseases Bill held on the 10th and 11th of June, 2020. Among several groups that made submissions on the Bill, was the Nigeria Governors\u2019 Forum, headed by Governor Kayode Fayemi. The Forum proposed that State and Local Governments should retain powers to make regulations in times [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1516"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1526,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions\/1526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}