Powers
Under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic (18 July 1999), the National Assembly has oversight of the executive in voting on legislation, overriding a Presidential veto, voting no confidence in the Prime Minister, and the reserved right of nominating the Prime Minister. As well, the Assembly has recourse to publicly investigate the executive through committee hearings, hearing in plenary sittings, commissions of enquiry, formal parliamentary questions, "Question Time", and Interpellations. There is no formal parliamentary ombudsman oversight of government.
Under a presidential system of government briefly instituted in 2009–2010, the National Assembly had no power over the selection of the Prime Minister and could not hold a vote of no confidence in the government; however, it also could not be dissolved by the President. As part of the constitutional change, the introduction of a Senate was planned, at which point the National Assembly would have become the lower house of a bicameral parliament. However, all the changes proved abortive, as President Mamadou Tandja, who had orchestrated them, was ousted in a February 2010 coup.
Read more about this topic: National Assembly Of Niger
Famous quotes containing the word powers:
“To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)