A member of the House of Representatives, Bayo Balogun, on Tuesday, revealed that the green chamber is pushing a bill to amend the 1999 Constitution, proposing that the Court of Appeal serve as the final authority on governorship election petitions in Nigeria. Balogun, who chairs the House Committee on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), made this known during an appearance on Channels Television’s *Politics Today* programme. “One advantage of that provision is that while the state and National Assembly are in the Tribunal, then the presidential and governorship will be at the Appeal Court. So, by the time they are moving from the Appeal to the Supreme Court, the one of the state and National Assembly will now be going to the Appeal Court. So we will now have a spread,” he stated. “What we are trying to do now is to reduce the tribunal period to 90 days and the appeal to 50 days,” he added. “Then we have the 21 days for filing of the petition and 14 days for filing of the appeal. By the time we put all these number together, we are looking at 185. “What we are putting down in the Act is that the election will not be held later than 185 days to the swearing in. Once we remove it from the constitution, we wil now put the provisions in the Electoral Act.” The lawmaker explained that the proposed law would require INEC to conduct elections earlier than February, allowing enough time to conclude all post-election litigations before the expiration of a governor’s tenure. He noted that, once enacted, there would no longer be three stages of appeal after a governorship election, as the bill seeks to exclude the Supreme Court from the appeal process in such disputes. Currently, governorship election petitions can progress from the Tribunal to the Court of Appeal and finally to the Supreme Court, which serves as the ultimate authority on such matters. By contrast, the Court of Appeal is already the final court for National and State House of Assembly election cases. The bill, titled *‘A Bill for an Act to Alter the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 to Make the Court of Appeal the Final Appeal Court in Governorship, National and State Houses of Assembly Election’*, was sponsored by Nnamdi Ezechi, who represents Ndokwa East/Ndokwa West/Ukwuani Constituency.