The Nigerian senate on Wednesday voted to amend the constitution setting a time limit of 14 days within which the president must formally notify the parliament of any inablity to perform his functions.
The vote came as President Umaru Yar’Adua returned home Wednesday after a three-month stay in a Saudi hospital.
In a majority vote, senators voted to amend section 145 of the 1999 constitution which is silent on the period of time that a sitting president can be away from office on grounds of inability to perform his functions or on vacation.
The amendment proposed stipulated that whenever the president is proceeding on vacation or is unable to discharge his functions, he must transmit a written declaration to the leadership of the two houses of the national assembly.
Until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, the vice president shall assume his fuctions as acting president, it says.
But in the event that he is unable or fails to transmit this written declaration within 14 days, the national assembly will, through a simple majority resolution of the legislators in the two houses mandate the vice president to perform the president’s function in acting capacity.
Eighty-nine senators voted to amend the section while only two voted against it.
“We don’t want a situation of an indefinite absence of the president,” one of the motion supporters, Bassey Ewa Henshaw, stated while debating the motion in the senate Wednesday.
The senate’s move was triggered by the political vacuum and constitutional crisis created by the absence of President Yar’Adua who left the country on November 23 without formally informing the parliament or transferring powers to his deputy.
Yar’Adua, 58, was hospitalised in Jeddah for an acute heart ailment and returned home in the early hours of Wednesday.
A statement from his office said that his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, voted into office by the parliament earlier this month, would remain in charge while the president continues to recuperate.
The amendment needs the approval of parliaments in 24 of the 36 states to become law.