A prominent member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Abiodun Salami, has advocated for the adoption of a unicameral legislative system in Nigeria to reduce the cost of governance.
Salami, the former Assistant Publicity Secretary of the APC in Lagos, made this call during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday.
His comments come amid growing calls for Nigeria to abandon its current bicameral National Assembly in favor of a single-chamber legislature.
A unicameral legislature consists of one legislative chamber, unlike a bicameral legislature, which has two chambers: the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Countries with unicameral legislatures include China (National People’s Congress), Norway (Storting), Sweden (Riksdag), Denmark (Folketing), and Portugal (Assembly of the Republic).
Salami proposed merging the Senate and the House of Representatives and reducing the number of legislators to form a more efficient and less costly single-chamber legislature.
“Bicameral legislature is wasteful. We can merge the Senate and the House of Representatives to have a single house to ease the business of lawmaking and reduce the huge funds spent to maintain the two chambers that we have now,” Salami stated.
“We can merge the two chambers and then reduce the number of lawmakers. The country spends a lot maintaining the 109 Senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives.”
Salami emphasized the current economic challenges facing the country and urged for sacrifices and bold steps to be made.
“We are having challenges with the economy right now. We should be ready to make sacrifices and take bold steps.
The bicameral legislature we are having, to me, is frivolity,” he added.
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