by MyEngineers
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has declined assent to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply Management of Nigeria (Establishment) Amendment Bill, 2026, citing legal and structural defects in the document, alongside a separate rejection of the Raw Materials Research and Development Council (Amendment) Bill, 2026.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Tajudeen Abbas, read letters conveying both decisions to the House during plenary on Wednesday.
In the first letter, dated July 7, 2026, the President said his decision on the procurement bill was taken pursuant to Section 58(4) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amended.
He noted that the proposed amendments were largely in order, except for a set of new subclauses under Clause 8 of the Bill, which sought to insert subclauses 10 to 15 after Section 11(9) of the Principal Act.
According to the President, those subclauses would have required companies and organisations to report the appointment of their heads of procurement to the Institute within one month, and would have imposed a daily fine of N2,000, with 10 percent interest, on any organisation that appointed a head of procurement who was not a registered member of the Institute.
Tinubu said this provision “would amount to forcing incorporated entities or organisations to recruit members of the Institute as heads of procurement and would constitute an unreasonable restraint of trade.”
He also rejected clauses that would have allowed the Institute to sue non member organisations for non compliance, set up inspection committees to visit companies, and demand compliance reports, describing these powers as beyond what a professional body, as opposed to a regulator, is legally permitted to exercise.
The President said the Bill could be reworked and sent back for assent once the flagged sections are corrected.
In a separate letter, also dated July 7, 2026, Tinubu declined assent to the Raw Materials Research and Development Council (Amendment) Bill, 2026, citing what he called structural errors and drafting defects, including a long title that failed to reflect the actual policy objectives of the Principal Act, and new sections on value addition to raw materials that were wrongly placed among the financial provisions of the law, making the Bill, in his words, disjointed.
Why This Matters
The rejected procurement bill touched something far more sensitive than paperwork. It touched who gets to control access to jobs in one of Nigeria’s most important economic functions, procurement and supply chain management, the process through which government and private organisations buy the goods and services they need to run.
Had the Bill passed as originally drafted, the implications would have been significant. Every company and government agency in Nigeria would have been legally required to report the identity of their procurement head to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply Management of Nigeria within a month of appointment.
Any organisation that placed someone without the Institute’s membership card in charge of procurement would have faced a running daily fine until that person was removed. In practice, this would have forced private businesses, many of whom currently hire procurement heads based on experience, qualifications from other disciplines, or internal promotion, to either pay continuous penalties or restructure their hiring around membership of a single professional body.
That is what the President meant when he described the provision as an unreasonable restraint of trade. Businesses would have lost the freedom to decide who runs their own procurement units, based not on merit or internal judgment, but on compliance with an outside professional association.
A Familiar Problem With How Nigeria Makes Laws
This is not the first time a Nigerian bill has run into trouble for granting a professional institute powers that belong to a regulator, and it will likely not be the last. Bills of this nature tend to move through the National Assembly with input mainly from the institute or association pushing for the amendment, and far less consultation with the wider industry the law is meant to govern.
In this case, the people most affected, procurement officers working outside the Institute’s membership, private sector employers, and government agencies with existing procurement structures, appear not to have been meaningfully consulted before the Bill reached its final drafting stage.
The result is legislation that reads like it was written to protect the interests of one professional body rather than to serve the sector as a whole. This is a recurring weakness in Nigerian law making. Bills affecting an entire industry are frequently shaped mostly by the association seeking expanded powers, with limited independent scrutiny from other professionals, businesses, or legal drafters until the Bill lands on the President’s desk, or worse, gets signed into law and only faces challenge in court years later.
The Line Between a Regulator and a Professional Institute
At the heart of the President’s rejection is a distinction that Nigerian law takes seriously, the difference between a regulator and a professional institute.
A regulator is a body given statutory power by an Act of the National Assembly to set binding rules for an entire sector, including people and organisations who are not its members. A professional institute, on the other hand, is typically a membership body. Its enforcement powers, as a general legal principle, extend to its own registered members, not to the public or to companies that never joined it.
Tinubu made this distinction explicit in his letter, stating plainly that “the Institute is not the regulator of the procurement sector and therefore cannot direct or compel participants on matters relating to their internal affairs.”
This principle is grounded in Nigerian law itself. Under the Companies and Allied Matters Act, 2020, incorporated companies and organisations are recognised as independent legal entities with the right to manage their own internal affairs, including hiring decisions, subject only to laws that validly apply to them.
A professional institute cannot, on its own authority, impose compliance obligations, inspection rights, or penalties on companies that are not its members, because doing so would amount to regulatory power the institute was never granted by its enabling Act.