GIVING NIGERIAN WOMEN THEIR DUE

Our women deserve more than what they are getting. It’s time to revise the trend

Women and girls constitute approximately 49.3 per cent of Nigeria’s population. They till its farms, run its markets, raise its children, bear its future.  Therefore, what they deserve, what this nation owes them, is the ordinary dignity of equal citizenship. At this moment when we require the contribution of every citizen for the peace and prosperity of our country, we cannot continue with one hand tied behind our national back. The cost of excluding the women and girls is not paid by them alone, it is paid by all of us, in a development deficit that compounds with every election cycle we allow to pass without correction. As people all over the world mark the 2026 International Women’s Day with the theme, ‘Give to Gain’, Nigerians must come to terms with the fact that when they give generously, women and girls get a fairer deal.

On this International Women’s Day, we salute Nigerian women for their resilience. They have had to be extraordinary simply to remain in the room. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Nigeria currently ranks 180th out of 185 countries evaluated globally for women’s representation in parliament. In sub-Saharan Africa, a region not exactly renowned for its feminist governance traditions, Nigeria sits at the very bottom. The region’s average is 27.3 per cent. Rwanda, our continental exemplar, has achieved 61.3 per cent women in its legislature. Sierra Leone enacted a Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Act in 2023 and within months saw women win 30.4 per cent of parliamentary seats. And yet, in the 10th National Assembly, women occupy a grand total of 19 out of 469 available seats. That is 3.8 per cent. Four sit in the Senate; 15 in the House of Representatives. Expand the lens to include our 36 State Houses of Assembly, and the picture only darkens. Across all 1,460 legislative seats, federal and states combined, women hold 64 slots. As the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, himself acknowledged recently, those 64 women are expected to represent the hopes, rights, and interests of over 100 million Nigerian women. No reasonable mind can defend this as democracy.

The picture in the executive arm tells the same story. Across the country’s 36 states, women hold just nine per cent of political offices in total. Since the return to civilian rule in 1999, not a single woman has been elected governor of any of Nigeria’s 36 states. Not one. In 26 years of uninterrupted democracy, which is itself a feat we celebrate, not a single state in this federation of 250 ethnic groups, of lawyers and professors and technocrats and activists, has elected a woman to its highest executive office. When President Bola Tinubu constituted his cabinet, 18 per cent of ministers were women, a figure that gender advocates rightly noted fell short of the campaign trail commitments that preceded it. Our National Gender Policy, which this government, like every government before it, claims to honour, prescribes a minimum of 35 per cent representation for women in both elective and appointive positions. We are not halfway there. We are not a quarter of the way there. We are a fraction of a fraction, and we speak of it as though it were a minor administrative inconvenience rather than a structural failure of governance.

Critical stakeholders must come to terms with the fact that circumscribing access to opportunities that ultimately empowers women who make up about 50 per cent of the Nigerian population is counterproductive for the development of our society. Rebuilding Nigeria requires decisions, beginning this year, in party primaries, candidate screenings and legislative chambers. It requires men willing to share power because they understood, finally, what we all stand to gain from it.

As Nigeria therefore joins the rest of the world to mark the 2026 International Women’s Day, we must celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of our mothers, sisters and daughters. But we also need an institutional mechanism to strategically address all the impediments placed against them. That is the only way to assure our women that we care about their welfare and the prosperity of our country.

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We must celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of our mothers, sisters and daughters. But we also need an institutional mechanism to strategically address all the impediments placed against them