By Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

The 2023 Gubernatorial, National Assembly and State House of Assembly elections have been woefully unsatisfactory when it comes to the inclusion of women. No female Governor emerged (Senator Aisha Benani’s attempt is still ‘inconclusive’ in Adamawa State) and we now have less than 4% of women in the National Assembly, even less than the class of 2019.

We still don’t have all the figures in from the State Houses of Assembly but just like before, there are States in the country with not a single woman in the House of Assembly. This is an essay I wrote in August 2016 and the arguments therein still apply. Nigerian women deserve better.Sometimes, in the midst of gloom and doom, there is hope. The good news from Ekiti State for this season is that six women won their seats into the Ekiti State House of Assembly, probably the highest number in the country. Congratulations to all of them and the other female political warriors across the country. Aluta Continua.

I have an older friend who is from Zimbabwe. I will call her Hannah. She fought in the Zimbabwe liberation war in the 1970s. Then she was a young girl, but she experienced things people thrice her age could not even imagine. When the war was over and Zimbabwe became an independent nation State in 1980, she managed to go back to school to train as a Social Worker. The political movement she had served all her life was now in power through the political party ZANU-PF. Things got a bit better for people in her country, but not for women. Women were still the poorest of the poor.

Women were still victims of gender-based violence. Women could not inherit land. Women did not have much of a voice in decision-making. The liberation struggles in the frontline states in the 1970s and 80s – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola and others caused massive upheavals in the Southern Africa region. This helped aid the spread of HIV/AIDS, as people moved from one part of the region to another, fleeing conflict as refugees or looking for work as migrants.

When the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit, not only were women the most vulnerable to infection, they were the ones who had to care for sick members of their families. Entire households were wiped out, often leaving frail grandmothers to look after grandchildren, or worse still, children looking after children. Hannah and women like her had their hands full. When I was at the African Women’s Development Fund, I visited several projects in the Southern African region that we had funded to address the role of women who were fighting the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The women’s movements in the Southern Africa region that had worked alongside other social and political movements to end apartheid and colonial rule then turned their energies towards demanding for women’s rights. After all, during the political struggles, they had been told that once the colonial masters had been dislodged, they would all, men and women alike, live together in peace and harmony as free citizens. It was a lie and a great con.  Hannah became a Member of Parliament. However, she refused to toe the party line all the time. She did not want to do business as usual.

She wanted the government to be accountable to the people, especially women. Many of the people she was in parliament with had not been freedom fighters. They had been studying in elite schools abroad during the liberation wars. When all was safe and good, they came back home and rode to power on the back of a struggle women like Hannah had almost lost their lives for. They did not understand why Hannah was always ‘angry’, and ‘stubborn’.

Why could she not be like the other women, quiet and amenable? Hannah left the comfort of her familiar political terrain and joined the opposition. That was around the time I met her for the first time, at a leadership conference for African women which took place in South Africa. Leaving the safety of her old party left Hannah vulnerable to attacks. She was hounded, arrested, and put through all kinds of humiliation. All this did not deter Hannah. She decided to focus her energies on her civil society activities, whilst at the same time trying to influence government policies.

Due to the fact that over time, women’s rights activists from the old frontline states became so disillusioned with their respective countries, a proactive movement for gender justice in the Southern Africa region became quite visible. This was driven mainly by the need for accountability to women. If women are good enough to carry guns and fight in the bush, why are they not good enough to hold positions of leadership in their countries? It has been suggested that it is the countries that have gone through violent conflict that provide the most opportunities for women to lead.

During the wars, the men leave women behind to hold families together. Women are the first to join forces to demand for peace as we witnessed in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And in the case of Rwanda, as the country began the painful process of reconstruction after the 1994 genocide, it was done with an acknowledgement that women had to be key stakeholders if there was to be any meaningful future. Today, Rwanda has the highest number of women in parliament in the world at 63%.

I decided to share Hannah’s story today because I believe in a country like Nigeria, we need to get more serious about the issue of women and leadership. Recently, I was asked to be a panelist on a twitter conference, #two can win this game, addressing the issue of women and political participation. By now we know all the issues. How difficult it is for women to run for office or become leaders due to negative gender stereotypes, religion and tradition. How expensive politics can be, or the culture of violence that has become so endemic. How women do all the work to sustain party machineries through their mobilization and coordination efforts, only to be marginalized when it is time to allocate positions.

All these problems apply all around the world, more so in African countries where poverty, education levels and the influence of religion and culture have such a stronghold on the fates of women. So on the one hand, Nigeria is no different from other countries in Africa where women still face an uphill struggle. On the other hand, Nigeria has no excuse for 5.6% of women in the National Assembly. This is totally unacceptable. With the large numbers of women who have access to education, and who are leaders in the business, corporate and public sectors, we have enough of a pool to draw from across all the 36 States of the federation. A question you will have by now is what needs to happen? My suggestions are informed by listening to and working with women leaders from other parts of the continent, who come from a context that is not different from that of Nigeria. 

First, there needs to be a consensus on the need for women’s voices to be heard, hereby popularizing the notion of women’s leadership. Second, Affirmative Action and Quotas is the key to ensuring that the number of women in decision-making across all sectors continues to grow and not drop. If this does not happen, women will keep embarking on futile visits to political leaders asking for favours that are supposed to be rights. We cannot continue to point to the large numbers of women in leadership in South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda without taking into consideration the role constitutional provisions such as Affirmative Action have played in those places. Third, women who have been privileged to receive an education and other benefits owe it to other women to pull them up.