The Speaker of the House, Femi Gbajabiamila, has introduced a bill that would alter the MPs’ title to “Representatives,” thus members of the House of Representatives are no longer permitted to be addressed as “Honorables.”
A Bill for an Act to Amend the Legislative Houses (Powers and Privileges) Act, 2017, is the name of the proposed legislation.
Members of the 9th House, including the Speaker, have already started using “Rep.” before their names rather than the traditional “Honourable” or “Hon.”
Through the amendment bill, Gbajabiamila is now attempting to make it legal for a member’s “address and designation” to change.
The bill seeks to insert new Sections 21 and 22 into the Legislative Houses (Powers And Privileges) Act, which read, “(21) A member of the Senate shall be designated and addressed as a Senator and shall be entitled to have before his name the word ‘Senator’ during his term in office and for life.
“(22) A member of the House of Representative shall be designated and addressed as a ‘Representative’ and shall be entitled to have before his name the word ‘Representative’ during his term in office and for life.”
The Speaker wrote in the explanatory note, “This bill seeks to define the designation and address before the name of a member of the National Assembly.”
