National Assembly okays constitution amendments

After some initial hitches in the electronic voting procedure, the Senate and House of Represen-tatives yesterday approved all the clauses presented for amendment in the Constitution (Second Alteration) Bill 2010, thereby effectively moving the 2011 elections to April.

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This followed the unanimous adoption of the report of its committees on the review of the 1999 Constitution. The bill will now be forwarded to the 36 state houses of assembly for the concurrence of at least 24 of the legislative houses before the amendments can become law.
The bill was principally necessitated by the need to give the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) more time to put all prerequisite logistics for the conduct of free, fair and credible elections in place, especially as the timelines given the commission by the Constitution (First Altera-tion) Act were said to be too tight for next year's general election.
In the new amendments, new time-lines for the conduct of the National Assembly, state Houses of Assembly, presidential and governorship elections by INEC and also to address the process of adjudication of governorship election petitions have been accommodated.
With the amendments passed yesterday, Sections 76, 116, 132 and 178 of the First Alteration Act that stipulate the holding of elections on a date not earlier than 150 days and not later than 120 days before the expiration of the tenure of office of the respective incumbents were amended to read "not earlier than 150 days and not later than 30 days before" the expiration of the respective incumbents' tenure of office.
This means that next year's general election, which was to have held in January according to the "not later than 120 days" timeline stipulated in the amended Act, would now hold in April next year, which is "not later than 30 days" to the May 29 hand-over date. 

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