By Our Correspondent <\/p>\n
The Senate on Thursday at plenary threw out a bill seeking to establish a National Ethnic and Reconciliation Commission (NERC). <\/p>\n
The bill, according to the sponsor, seeks to prevent, manage, and resolve ethnic conflicts, promote national cohesion, foster peace building, among others. <\/p>\n
The bill, which had already scaled through first reading at a previous plenary, was sponsored by Senator(Prof)Anthony Ani, representing Ebonyi South district. <\/p>\n
At the second reading stage however, some senators pointed out a number of anomalies in the bill, which they said, must not be ignored. <\/p>\n
First to spot an anomaly in the bill was Senator Eyinnaya Abaribe who pointed out that the acronym of the bill NERC, is the same with that of Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC). <\/p>\n
“The Senate cannot pass laws establishing two separate commissions with the same acronym,” Abaribe noted. <\/p>\n
Also, Senator Adams Oshiomhole (Edo North), pointed out that there is no such thing as “National Ethnic” as Nigeria does not have a single ethic group. <\/p>\n
Besides, Oshiomhole cautioned that passing such a bill into law would place additional financial burden on the federal government at a time the government is struggling to meet some of its financial obligations. <\/p>\n
President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio drove the final nail in the coffin when he declared that the country did not need such a bill. <\/p>\n
Akpabio noted that some senators who had earlier supported the bill, did so on sentiment, even when they knew that the bill was inappropriate and that it would serve no purpose. <\/p>\n
“Nigerian does not need this bill. Some of you supporting it are doing so on sentiment. Even from the tone of it, the bill doesn’t stand for anything. <\/p>\n
“Some of you know that cannot get anywhere but you are supporting it. Later, you would be coming to me one after another to tell me that something is wrong with the bill. We should not make the Senate a laughing stock,” Akpabio said.<\/p>\n
When he called for voice vote to pass or reject the bill, the senators voted overwhelmingly against the bill with a resounding “Nay,” thereby throwing the bill in the trash can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Our Correspondent The Senate on Thursday at plenary threw out a bill seeking to establish a National Ethnic and Reconciliation Commission (NERC). The bill, according to the sponsor, seeks to prevent, manage, and resolve ethnic conflicts, promote national cohesion, foster peace building, among others. The bill, which had already scaled through first reading at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[904,5506,1502,334,5507],"class_list":["post-9030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law-crime","tag-building","tag-ethnic-conflicts","tag-foster","tag-peace","tag-promote-national-cohesion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9031,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9030\/revisions\/9031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}