The Senate on Wednesday resolved to return to its original three times weekly sitting, as against the twice sitting that the Ninth Senate adopted following the scourge of COVID-19 in 2021.
Accordingly, the apex legislative Assembly will now be holding its plenary session on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays every week, in line with its rules, which the Ninth Assembly set aside.
Section 63 of the Constitution provides that the Senate and the House of Representatives shall each sit for not less than 181 days in a year while Section 68 thereof states that any legislator who fails to attend the proceedings of the House or Senate for less than one-third of the required number of days shall automatically lose his or her seat.
Since the reduction of the number of sitting days to two in a week, the two Chambers of the National Assembly would obviously not meet the mandatory constitutional requirement of 181 sittings yearly.
The Upper Chamber to the decision for this adjustment following a Point of Order raised to that effect during plenary by Senator Eyinnaya Abaribe (APGA, Abia South).
President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, presiding over the plenary, agreed with the point of order raised by the Abia lawmaker and approved the order.
It will be recalled that the Senate had during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, rescheduled its plenary sessions to just Tuesdays and Wednesdays while their House of Representatives counterpart continued to hold plenary sessions thrice weekly until the current Tenth Assembly.