‘Over half of sponsored bills in N’Assembly in last one year recycled’

• As 15 senators, 149 reps failed to sponsor bills

National Assembly has been criticised for not doing enough on the passage of legislations in its first one year.

The allegation was made by a parliamentary monitoring organisation and public policy think-tank, OrderPaper.

Founder and Executive Director of OrderPaper, Oke Epia, in a statement, yesterday, observed that the first year of the 10th National Assembly had witnessed a surge, but slow pace of progression of sponsored bills, a significant number of which were proposals recycled from the preceding 9th assembly.

In a performance report card of the National Assembly, set for release this week, OrderPaper revealed that over half of the bills sponsored in the Senate between June 2023 and May 2024, were recycled from previous assemblies, especially the immediate past Ninth Assembly.

The outfit claimed that nearly one-third of the bills processed in the House of Representatives within the same period were resurrected from the past.

This trend, it noted, raised grave concerns about possible legislative ‘copy-pasting’ and further fuelled speculations of merchandising of bills in the federal legislature.

The analysis by OrderPaper showed that from June 2023 to May 2024, the Senate introduced 475 bills, out of which only 19 had been passed, while 416 remained stuck awaiting second reading.

It also noted that out of 1,175 bills introduced in the House of Representatives in the same period under review, only 58 had been passed while a vast majority of 967 were awaiting second reading.

Among other facts produced by the OrderPaper analysis, 15 senators did not sponsor a bill, while 149 members of the House, which is 12.6 per cent of the total membership, did not sponsor any bill in the period under review.

Notably, 62 per cent of the representatives in the green chamber with no bills to their names, are first-time lawmakers.

The performance report also highlighted a lack of focus on critical issues of national importance.

Bills related to agriculture and food security make up only 5.8 per cent of the total House bills and 7.3 per cent of Senate bills. Security-related bills account for 7.2 per cent of House bills and 5.4 per cent of Senate bills.

The outfit noted that despite the significant challenges faced by citizens in these sectors in recent years, bills addressing these issues remained few, with many not even progressing past the first reading.

Commenting on the key findings, Oke Epia argued that the surge in bill submissions by lawmakers and slow progress in processing underscored a real challenge the National Assembly had been grappling with over the years: getting bills through to the legislative finish line.

Epia stated that while OrderPaper yearly performance reports of the National Assembly over the years had led to an increase in the number of bills sponsored by lawmakers, citizens had a responsibility to look beyond volume and focus more on progression, value and impact.

Giving insight into the approach and focus of this year’s performance report card, programme executive (creativity and innovation) at OrderPaper Nigeria, Joy Erurane, said the team undertook in-depth sectoral analysis of bills processed to cover key areas like education, health, economic development, security, and public finance.