The House of Representatives is to delay the second reading of the controversial National Water Resources Bill, 2020, till September when the National Assembly resumes from its annual two-month recess.
The Chairman of the House Committee on Water Resources, Sada Soli, made this known at the plenary on Thursday.
According to him, the break will allow members to scrutinise the proposals in the legislation and note their observations.
The bill had re-emerged on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 29, 2022, amidst suspicions from members.
The leadership, however, assured the lawmakers that the new version of the legislation would capture all the interests of the states.
Speaking on Thursday, Soli announced that the bill had been re-gazetted.
He said, “Now I am calling on the Clerk to please ensure that the bill goes to every member because of the importance of the bill. And I call on my colleagues to please kindly take time, read that bill, subject that bill to (scrutiny by) a third party. You have time now to subject that bill back home during our holidays.
“We will not take that bill in haste. We will give every member the opportunity to look at that bill from Clauses 1 to 154.
In a related development, the lawmaker representing Andoni/Opobo/Nkoro Federal Constituency in Rivers State, Dagomie Abiante, has said Ijaw lawmakers in the National Assembly will always fight for the interest of their people on any matter of national importance.
Abiante stated this while addressing members of the Ijaw National Congress who visited his office in Abuja on Wednesday to communicate the position of the Ijaw nation on the water bill.
The INC President, Prof. Benjamin Okaba, who led the delegation, said, “Notwithstanding that the bill seeks to inter alia commercialise the utilisation of water resources via a licensing regime and collapse previous legislations relating to water resources into a single instrument, the reintroduction of this bill in the twilight days of the Buhari-led administration, and at such a critical time in the history of the nation, with the various recurrent challenges, really calls for circumspect.”
