2012 budget: Jonathan lied, says Senate

The war of words between President Goodluck Jonathan and the National Assembly may be far from over.
 The Senate yesterday said Jonathan lied over the role played by the National Assembly in the 2012 Budget.
On Monday, Jonathan and House of Representatives’ Speaker Aminu Waziri T ambuwal openly disagreed at the Presidential Villa, Abuja over the failure of the President  to assent to Bills passed by the National Assembly.
Jonathan fired back that the lawmakers are overreaching the separation of powers as enshrined in the constitution.
Deputy Senate President yesterday at a Public Hearing on “A Bill to create Erosion control and prevention Commission (Establishment etc) 2012”  described as “distortion of facts” the claim of Jonathan that the National Assembly made inputs into the 2012 Budget that rendered it un-implementable.
 Ekweremadu said the Presidency has no excuse not to fully implement the budget.
He wondered why President Jonathan would accuse the National Assembly of tearing the 2012 budget into piece “when we sent it back substantially the way they brought it to us.”
He said the National Assembly is constitutionally empowered to appropriate for the country.
 He frowned at the refusal of President Jonathan to assent to numerous Bills passed by the National Assembly.
 He said: “Now this reminds me of what the President said during the democracy day symposium.
 “We expressed our displeasure over some of the Bills which we sent to the Presidency for assent since last year that have not received Presidential assent.
 “And in response, the President said that is because we are creating agencies. We will continue to create agencies if it is important because that is why we are here. So we have to do our job. If agencies are to be created, they need to be created. Just to add to that, most of those Bills have nothing to do with agencies.
 “I remember we have the State of the Nation Address Bill, it has nothing to do with agency and it has not been signed.
 “We have the National Health Bill. It has nothing to do with an agency. It has not been signed. We have the Air Force Institute of Technology Bill and Tobacco Bill.
 “A whole number of Bills that would have changed a lot of things for this country have not been signed.
 “So, my advice to the Executive Arm of Government is to dialogue with the legislature in matter like this and find a common ground, instead of shifting blames because the making of laws is dynamic.
 “If institutions are to be created they will definitely be created. Any person who thinks that the creation of institutions should stop is wasting his time. It would not stop because the society itself is dynamic.
 “I also believe that the issue which he also raised regarding the Appropriation Bill was also a distortion of facts.
 “The President said that we tore the Appropriation Bill into pieces which made it impossible for implementation. Certainly that is not so.
 “I am aware that the 2012 Appropriation Bill was returned to the Executive substantially the same way they brought it.
 “So we are challenging them to ensure that that Bill, the 2012 Appropriation Act is fully implemented.
 “We did that, we gave them back the Appropriation Bill the way it came mostly because all the years they have been complaining that they could not implement the budget because of the inputs of the National Assembly.
 “So this year we said we are not making any input; we are going to give you the Bill the way you brought it as a challenge to ensure that it is implemented.
 “So we expect them to implement it 100 per cent because that is their own vision.
 “Of course, he also made reference to a point where they wanted to go to court to challenge the role of the National Assembly in altering Appropriation Bills.
 “Well, that will be a welcome development.
 “So we want to suggest that the Executive should please take that step of going to the Supreme Court or any court they wish to look at the constitutionality of our role in terms of appropriation for this country.
 “We will be happy to see the outcome and of course, we will obey whatever the court says.”


 SOURCE

Tobacco bill, big test of Jonathan’s promise – Oluwafemi

Akinbode Oluwafemi

Akinbode Oluwafemi, Director, Corporate Accountability and Campaigns of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) speaks on the National Tobacco Control Bill that is awaiting presidential assent in this interview with SINA FADARE. Excerpts:

The National Tobacco Control Bill was one of the high profile bills passed by the 6th National Assembly. What is the status of the bill now?

The bill was passed by the National Assembly, inciden-tally on World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) last year. What the people out there may not know is that passing a bill is not the end of legislative process. In fact, it is the beginning of another phase. There are legislative processes that a bill has to go through to prepare it for presidential assent. There is no time limit to the completion of this process, so it really depends on how fast the various arms of the Na-tional Assembly can work together to bring the legislative process to a completion.

But as a civil society organisation that has supported and advocated for this bill from the very beginning, ERA/FoEN has continued to offer support throughout this legis-lative process. We are now at the stage where the bill would be forwarded to the president for his signature in order to become law. This is the most delicate junction where we are afraid that the tobacco industry, having failed so far to stop this bill, may want to exact undue influence to stop it from becoming law.

You spoke about the tobacco industry’s influence over tobacco control processes. How realistic is this espe-cially in Nigeria?

The tobacco industry is known to have one of the biggest lobbying machines in the world and this is possible be-cause they have enormous financial resources with which to pay the best lawyers and lobbyists. In developing countries, the industry capitalises on poverty to bring in the trade of death in the name of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). That was the situation we found ourselves in 2001.

Is there a possibility that the signing of the bill would be tenable?

There are no legal hindrances to the signing of the bill. Let me tell you that the House of Representatives con-curred with the Senate version on the last day of legisla-tive duties in the last Assembly. There is no constitutional time frame for this process to happen. So, there is nothing to fear in this. This bill has followed to the letter, the consti-tutional lay down procedures for the enactment of a law. The only thing remaining now is for President Goodluck Jonathan to sign it and the process will be completed.

What if the President refuses to sign this bill?

No, the President cannot refuse to sign it bill. I remem-ber he said during his swearing-in that he will never let Ni-gerians down. This is a big test of the President’s promise. But he can refuse to sign a bill constitutionally. You know the executive is independent of the legislative process of law enactment and if there is a grey area, he may refuse to sign. But the tobacco bill is a public health bill. It is a bill that the President would sign. It is a bill that fulfils some of the electoral promises of Mr. President himself. Nigeria has an obligation to domesticate the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which in part is what the bill seeks to do. So, in order that we continue to fulfil our international obligations and continue our leadership role in continental and global tobacco control, Nigeria must demonstrate effectiveness and commitment at pushing through a comprehensive tobacco control policy despite the antics of the tobacco industry.

What should be done now to ensure a prompt signing of the bill?

The key is the Minister of Health. He must rise up to the occasion and take leadership of this process because the success or otherwise of public health in Nigeria is his responsibility. The minister is aware of the rising deaths associated with tobacco use; he knows that more young people under his watch are taking to smoking. He knows that while he is the Health Minister, several people are dy-ing daily from preventable tobacco deaths and he knows that the implementation of the tobacco bill will reverse this trend. There is an enormous responsibility on him. He is entrusted with the lives of Nigerians and he is aware of this. We hope and pray he will do needful.

SOURCE

'Nigeria's tobacco control bill is missing'

One year after the House of Representatives concurred with the National Tobacco Control Bill after it was passed by the Upper House, the bill appears to be missing.

At a Stakeholders' round table on the implementation of the bill organized by the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) on Monday, in Lagos, Olorunnimbe Mamora, a former senator who sponsored the bill in 2009, told participants that "no one knows where the bill is now".

"We must track it from the National Assembly, also ask the office of the Attorney-General, and even the presidency," Mr. Mamora, who represented Lagos East constituency in the 6th Assembly, said.

"This is one of the reasons why we continue to hammer on transparency in governance."

"It is not a favour being done to the people. We need to know what is happening because we passed the bill in the National Assembly... It cannot just disappear."

The National Tobacco Control Bill, passed by the Senate on March 15, 2011, and concurred by the Lower House on May 31, 2011 (World No Tobacco Day), requires the assent of the president before it becomes law.

"We are in a funny country," Mr. Mamora continued. 

"There are things I don't understand in this country and this is one of such things. What is happening to that bill? 

"We are not sure whether the bill has been presented to the president or not. It's like the whole thing is shrouded in secrecy and confusion," Mr. Mamora said.

In July, 2009, a public hearing on the bill conducted by the senate attracted more than 40 civil society groups, including groups from the tobacco industry who were against the bill.

"There were seen and unseen forces who did not want the bill to be passed. But unfortunately, the bill has crossed the Red Sea and could not return to Egypt," Mr. Mamora said.

Highlights of the bill includes prohibition of the sale of cigarettes to persons under the age of 18; ban of promotion of tobacco or tobacco products in any form; display of the word 'WARNING' in capital letters on every package containing tobacco product, amongst others.

Akinbode Oluwafemi, the Director of Corporate Accountability and Administration ERA/FoEN, said that the bill is "actually not missing."

"I think for now, even if the president doesn't have the bill, the president can request for the bill and sign it," Mr. Oluwafemi said. 

"We know that there are so many undercurrents that are happening and he [the president] needs to stand firm and resist the tobacco industry," he added. 

Mr. Oluwafemi further stated that the position of the Nigeria Constitution is "very clear on this matter."

"In the event of the president not signing the bill, he should send it back to Parliament with reasons why he's not signing. 

"Now the Parliament has the option of either revising the bill andresending it or they can veto, they can vote again on the bill and the bill becomes law," he said.

SOURCE

World No Tobacco Day: ERA wants tobacco bill signed

As the World marks the 2012 “World No Tobacco Day” on Thursday, the Environment Rights Action has called on the Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, to intervene and ensure the signing of the National Tobacco Control Bill.

Speaking at a stakeholders meeting in Lagos on Monday, the Director, Corporate Accountability and Administration ERA/FOEN, Mr. Akinbode Olufemi, said delay by the president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, to give his assent to the bill could lead to an epidemic of tobacco-smoking related diseases.

Also, in his presentation titled, “Promoting Public Health through legislation: Pushing the National Tobacco Control Bill, a former senator, Dr. Olorunnmibe Mamora, who sponsored the bill that was passed by the Senate last year, said the bill which seeks to prevent smoking in public spaces, smoking by minors and under-aged persons and pictorial advertisements of tobacco products, if passed into law, would reduce the incidence of non-communicable diseases in Nigeria.

Mamora urged the President and the minister to investigate the present status of the bill as it was their responsibility to protect Nigerians.

” Government has a duty to protect the welfare and the health of the people. It is a public health bill that would reduce diseases from tobacco smoking which has attained the status of a weapon of mass destruction.

” We should know where the bill is by now as it has been passed by both the Senate and the National Assembly. It is our right not a privilege to know whether the President has received it or not. Nigeria signed a global health treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, in 2004 and it must domesticate it. There must be transparency in issues of governance,” he stated.

Also, the Executive Director, ERA/FOEN, Mr. Nnimmo Bassey, called on the minister to save the bill from the delay antics and lobbying of players in the tobacco industry.

Bassey said, “After the overwhelming support the bill received in the Senate and the House of Representatives, it is sad that till date, it has not been signed by the President. The intervention of the Health Minister is a singular action that generations of Nigerians will not forget. Giving Nigerians this gift as we mark the 2012 World No Tobacco Day will be remarkable.”

SOURCE

Tobacco control bill lost in transit

THE National Tobacco Control Bill (NTCB) may have gone missing between the National Assembly and the Presidency a year after it was passed by the last National Assembly.

Following the harmonisation and adoption of the Senate’s version of the Tobacco Control Bill by the National Assembly on May 31, 2011, it was expected that the bill should be sent to the desk of the President for assent into law.

Findings, however, revealed that while President Goodluck Jonathan is interested in the public health benefits of the bill, key officials at the Presidency could not track the document for presidential assent into law.

Most worrisome, according to stakeholders, who eagerly await the passage of the tobacco control bill, is that the Ministry of Health and other key public officials that should be more interested in the passage are keeping mum.

The NTCB 2008 was designed to help in effective implementation of the provision of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Frame-work Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) that Nigeria endorsed on June 28, 2004.

The bill is to provide for the regulation of production, manufacture, sale, advertisement, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco or tobacco products in Nigeria. The frame-work policy on tobacco control bill is to promote public health and good environment that is free of tobacco-related hazards in the country.

A former lawmaker, who also sponsored the NTCB bill, Olorunnimbe Mamora, said that it was ‘funny’ that the bill was missing after “26 months of mounting a series of road-blocks before it was passed by the National Assembly.”

Mamora, who spoke at a round-table meeting of stakeholders, organised by the Environmental Rights Activists/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) yesterday in Lagos, said that all Nigerians must demand the status of the bill.

He lamented that the issue bothered on transparency in public places and Nigerians could not tell what was on the President’s mind in respect of the bill.

“We still cannot determine whether he got the bill or not, so it will be difficult to begin to apply the 30 days rule as provided by the constitution on the passage of a bill or alleged pocket vetoing.

“This is why we continue to hammer on transparency in governance. We have a right to know, it is not a favour that is done to the people. The bill that was passed by the National Assembly cannot just disappear. We, therefore, need to know what has happened to it,” he said.

Activist and former Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Ikorodu Branch, Nurudeen Ogbara, added that since the bill was in defence of the right of Nigerians to good health, the stakeholders must ask questions from the Ministry of Health, House Committee on Health, the lawmakers and the President.

“The tobacco control bill should have been their priority, yet they are doing nothing on it. The minister of health must tell us his stand on the bill, whether he supports it or not, because he is supposed to be the chief implementing officer,” he said.

Director, Corporate Accountability and Administration ERA/FoEN, Mr. Oluwafemi Akinbode, advised President Jonathan to summon the key government officials to determine the actual status of the bill.

He noted that it behoved Nigeria to domesticate the FCTC, being a global treaty that she signed and ratified, “and that is what the NTCB hopes to domesticate.”

SOURCE

STAKEHOLDERS ROUNDTABLE ON THE IMPLEMENTATION ON THE NATIONAL TOBACCO CONTROL BILL

‘How tobacco firms are hurting our health system’

Ahead of this year’s World No Tobacco Day which is marked every May 31, Akinbode Oluwafemi, director of Administration and Corporate Accountability at the Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), sheds lights on the strong lobby of tobacco companies and the need to have the National Tobacco Control Bill signed into law in this encounter with Joe Agbro Jr.

A meeting with Mr. Akinbode Oluwafemi of the Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) is filled with excitement. He talks with so much conviction and knowledge about the dangers of smoking that you are held captive and cannot help but listen and reason along with him.

Asked why he is so concerned about the battle against tobacco in the country, he says it is because tobacco kills about half of its consumers. But regrettably, policies in the country do not address this development. According to him, “when you look at smoking in Nigeria, you’ll think smoking is not a big problem. But, I’ must tell you that it’s a very big problem. And this problem has a link with how the tobacco industry is being regulated in the west. You know, most western governments have put in very stringent measures to regulate the practice of tobacco industry and to ensure that smoking rate is decreasing. And because of those measures and litigation, tobacco companies started looking elsewhere. The developing countries, of which Nigeria belongs, becomes a very prime target.”

Growing epidemic 

He is afraid that this smoking epidemic is very real here. According to a survey conducted in Adamawa, as much as 29percent of the youths in that are smokers, while a survey in 11 Lagos hospitals showed that “at least one person dies a day in each of those hospitals as a result of smoking.”

In the absence of a national statistics on smoking, a 2011 survey by the World Health Organisation (WHO)  shows that there is actually rising smoking among Nigerian girls rising up to the level of 3% a year. “That is alarming and extremely disturbing,” Oluwafemi says.

In the overall picture of insufficient healthcare infrastructure, diseases such as “heart disease, cancers of different types, impotence, heart condition, low birth rate, and loss of man hours at work places” are of serious challenge to the health care sector. 

According to WHO, tobacco currently kills over 5.4 million people yearly, with about 70percent of casualty occurring in developing countries like Nigeria, adding that every stick of cigarette contains over 4, 000 dangerous chemicals with over 40 of them being carcinogenic. 

To combat this disturbing outcome, Senator Olorunnibe Mamora sponsored the National Tobacco Bill which was eventually passed by the National Assembly on May 31st, 2011, a year ago. This Bill, Oluwafemi says, was “happily supported by Environmental Rights Action (ERA), it seeks to domesticate the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control, a global treaty, about the minimum standards that countries must adhere to in terms of legislating about tobacco.

“Nigeria is a signatory as well as a party. And since we are a party to that treaty, we are under obligation to implement the provision of that international treaty. The Bill seeks to end advertisement, sponsorship, and promotion, it prohibits the sale of cigarettes to minors, it recommended pictorial warnings on cigarette packs, and it bans smoking in public places. More importantly, that Bill seeks to create a committee, National Tobacco Control Committee which will serve as an advisory role in terms of reviewing the policy. That essentially is what that Bill is all about. I have heard people say that the Bill wants to close tobacco companies in Nigeria. I don’t know whether they have a separate Bill. This Bill has been passed and we are waiting for the presidential assent so that the Bill can become enforceable in Nigeria. We are worried that the presidential assent is taking too long. And we are very suspicious that some people somewhere may want to compromise public health and we’re calling on the president to see this Bill as an obligation to protect the health of the Nigerian people.”

He faulted the idea of mixing sponsorship with corporate social responsibility (CSR), Oluwafemi said, “Tobacco companies are inflicting monumental health impact on our nation. How do you mitigate that by buying computers or drilling boreholes? Can computers and boreholes make up for the lives of our brothers and sisters dying as a result of smoking? No. So, what we are saying is that let government impose appropriate taxes on those products.  Why is it that a pack of cigarettes is about six pounds (N1, 500) in London, seven dollars (N1, 300) in the US, and the same pack is selling for N200 in Nigeria? Other governments have moved ahead to impose appropriate taxes on tobacco products. Then, you can use those taxes to build the schools and to buy the computers. And this time around, even the way they have conducted themselves with the CSR, it is only another form of advertisement. They only practically move their advert budget into CSR so that they can always call government people to sit on the table and they can win public sympathy.”

He blames the non-passage of the National Tobacco Control Bill on the interference of the tobacco companies. “In fact, we have it on authority that they have started calling reporters not to run stories on World No Tobacco Day and stories around the Bill. They know that if this Bill is signed they would not be able to do those things that bring in more consumers the way they’ve always been doing. So, when this  is dragging for too long, our suspicion would certainly be that the tobacco industry has been moving underground as they’ve always been doing, not only  in Nigeria, but all around the world to undermine public health and to ensure that legislation that are for public health are never enacted.”  He punched holes in the industry’s argument that it has a large work force in the country, saying, “the tobacco companies are not employing up to 1, 000 people. That is the reality,” he said. 

He believes that the true nature of the industry is hidden from most Nigerians because “their business thrives on deception. They make people to think that when you smoke, it’s good. And they will never tell you the health implications. So, those deceptions were the basis of their objections which were completely irrelevant because whatever section that you have in this Bill are provisions that are just the basic in NTC Bill. Take for instance, in our Bill, we are seeking 50percent pictures on cigarette packs. A country as close as Mauritius is already enforcing 70percent. Ghana is already thinking of about 60 percent. In fact, some countries like Australia has even gone beyond the pictures and talk about plain packaging. They know it that they cannot debate this because the international community have moved way beyond what is even in this Bill as at today.”

He appealed to the president to sign the bill and save Nigerian youths from the looming tobacco epidemic.


SOURCE