Senate Moves to Revolutionise Agriculture, Tighten Emergency Healthcare Standards.
While the agricultural reform bill, sponsored by the Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Jibrin Barau, scaled second reading, a separate proposed amendment to the National Health Act, 2014, sponsored by Senator Abdulaziz Musa Yar’adua, seeks to introduce strict timelines for emergency medical attention and sanctions for healthcare providers that violate the prescribed standards.
The two legislative initiatives underscore the Senate’s efforts to deploy legislation to tackle food insecurity, declining agricultural productivity, inadequate emergency healthcare delivery and other challenges affecting the welfare of Nigerians.
Leading debate on his agricultural reform bill during plenary presided over by the President of the Senate, Senator Godswill Akpabio, Barau said Nigeria needed a fundamental transformation of its agricultural sector to restore its productive capacity and reposition it as a major driver of economic development.
The proposed legislation, titled, ‘A Bill for an Act to Provide a Comprehensive Legal Framework for the Transformation and Modernisation of Agriculture in Nigeria, Promote Food Security, Agricultural Productivity, Mechanisation, Irrigation, Agricultural Financing, Agro-industrialisation, Rural Development and Climate-Resilient Farming, seeks to provide a comprehensive statutory foundation for modernising the sector. Barau recalled the country’s glorious agricultural past, when agricultural production supplied essential raw materials to industries and contributed significantly to economic growth, lamenting that the collapse of those production systems had weakened the sector. He said the bill was designed to review existing agricultural practices, introduce necessary reforms and establish a new direction capable of stimulating productivity and unlocking the sector’s enormous potential. Describing the administration of President Bola Tinubu as reform-oriented, the Deputy Senate President said the proposed legislation was intended to complement the federal government’s ongoing economic reforms.
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