Last week, parliament called for submission of memoranda for two Bills proposing to amend a staggering 83 laws, and the public had only one week to give their views. Never mind some of these amendments touch serious fields; from land, to fisheries to energy to advocate practice, etcetera.
Forget that we might have needed possibly a month to review all the amendments proposed in the Statute Laws (Miscellaneous Amendment) Bill No 12 of 2018 and Statute Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill no 13 of 2018. The real problem, is that the bills are fundamentally flawed, and in legal terms, should fail ab initio.
First, let us address the historical roots of the concept. Omnibus bills also known as “Statue Law Amendment Bills” is a concept born in the United Kingdom and heavily adopted world over as a practical and efficient way to amend, repeal or enact several Acts. If there are two or more Acts all of which need to be amended to respond to a certain legal or environmental change, then it makes sense to have one Bill amending all of them.
Ideally, omnibus Bills were meant to be interrelated, like the land Laws Amendment Act of 2016 that amended 3 land statutes. The idea is, rather than amend each statute, one Bill is tabled to amend all the Acts within the same field. That way, if public participation is called for, the participant submits on the singular issue.
On the other hand, sometimes government would need to make slight amendments on unrelated statutes which would thereby require a new type of concept – Miscellaneous amendments.
Miscellaneous amendments in legal terms means a change of several, different things but “confined only to minor non-controversial and generally house-keeping amendments.”
For instance, Parliament may pass a Bill that replaces the word “District” with the word “County” to reflect the new constitutional dispensation. This is a minor amendment that does not raise pertinent issues in the functionality of the government or any impact on the parent statute. It can amend several bills which necessarily need not be related but in very minor ways.
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