Philip Nyiam 
The House of Representatives has said it will re-introduce and quicken the passage of the Diaspora Voting Bill rejected during the constitution amendment by the National Assembly Joint Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution. The Chairman of the House Committee on Diaspora Affairs, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, stated this when the Chairman/ CEO of the Nigerians in the Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM), Abike Dabiri- Erewa, appeared before them to defend the commission’s 2023 budget. Akande-Shadipe said the House may eventually pass the rejected bill because that is the direction the entire world is going. She said: “We would be back with the bill. They are Nigerians and they have the right to vote in Nigerian elections.
The modalities and the issues that were raised the last time would be resolved and we would come back to it Many citizens of Nigeria are leaving the country and the Nigeria Immigration Service is complicit in this issue of illegal migration. Once the immigration authorities are complicit, we are only making notice”. The lawmaker further revealed that the committee is also looking at the issue of people of Nigerian descent who currently are not Nigerians but want to return home after DNA tests conducted by the authorities had proven that they have ties to Nigeria. Dabiri-Erewa urged Nigerians to stop migrating to other countries if they don’t have jobs there.
According to her, 80 per cent of the prisoners in Dubai are Nigerians. She stressed the need for a stronger multisector collaboration between the Nigerian Immigration Service NIS, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) and other agencies to stop the trend.
