Senator Binta Masi Garba does not incite approbation whenever she is introduced as the only female senator from the 19 states that make up northern Nigeria. “Having only one woman from 57 elected legislators in an entire region is nothing to be applauded. It is not a thing of pride,” she said.
Born in the norther city of Kaduna, 51-year-old Garba has served three terms in the House of Representatives before she was elected into the Senate in 2015 to represent Adamawa North. She also made history as the first female chairperson of the state chapter of a registered mainstream political party when she emerged the chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Adamawa state.
But her story is not the story of many Nigerian women, competent in strength and character, who have aspired to power by contesting elections since the advent of the Fourth Republic. Nigerian women, assumed to be about half of the electorate with right to vote and hold public office, are under-represented as members of the National Assembly.
“Since the election of democracy in 1999, the Senate has been dominated by males,”, a report on Men and women in Nigeria credited to the National Bureau of Statistic stated. In 1999, there were only three women out of the 109 members of the Senate. In 2007, the number increased to eight. However, there was a decrease from eight women members in 2007 to seven in 2011.
The current dispensation, which ushered in President Muhammadu Buhari, has only seven women. In the Federal Executive Council where there are 36 ministers selected from states across the country, only six of them are women; a further indication that women are underrepresented among high ranking government administrators with decision making powers. Also, after 18 years of uninterrupted democratic governance, Nigeria is yet to produce a female governor in any of the 36 states of the Federation. The only woman who got close to achieving the feat, Senator Aisha Alhassan of Taraba Satte, was edged out, losing to her male opponent who gained the support of the Christian majority in Taraba state. In a few states across the federation, women play the second fiddle as ‘deputy’ or ‘vice’.
Gender inequality also manifest at the lowest level of governance as men account for 95.6 and 90.2 percent of all local government chairpersons and counsellors. Women who often play active roles in grassroots politics are left to grapple with a meagre 4.4 and 9.8 percent respectively.
Nigeria’s gender gap in governance is one of the lowest in the world. As the 2019 election draws near, there is no glimmer of hope that the tide would turn in favour of the womenfolk as only a few women have indicated interest to run in 2019.
Nnenna Elendu-Ukeje, one of the most vocal voices in the Federal House of Representatives, had in an interview with Reuters, admitted to having to fight discrimination, sexual innuendoes, physical threats and insubordination from male colleagues in her role as a
federal law maker. While campaigning in the last election, she was shot at and now fearful that fewer women will participate in the 2019 elections as a result of violence.
“If there are no disincentives for the perpetrators of violence, my fear is that the political space for women is going to continue to shrink,” she told Reuters.
Apart from violence and late-night meetings, women politicians are not also spared from nasty comments and threat from male colleagues. It leaves nothing to say that the Nigeria parliament is not always free of squabbles and intrigues as there have been a number of occasions where law federal lawmakers have engaged in fisticuffs on the floor of the House.
Women challenging the system with no wins
Politics in Nigeria has been dominated by the rich and powerful, with men ensuring their continued influence. With more than 80% of the nation’s resources concentrated in the hands of a few who dictate who gets elected into what position, there is no gainsaying the fact that the political space in Nigeria has shrunk for women. In a nation where interests within the big political parties are extremely powerful, exerting stranglehold in on elected officers and the people they are supposed to serve, it is not surprising that men would continue to consolidate their positions by fencing out their female counterparts from the mainstream political activities where real power lies.
Born on the March 2, 1955, Remi Sonaiya was the only female presidential aspirant in the 2015 elections. A professor of French Language and Applied Linguistics, the Cornell University-trained academic voluntarily retired from the Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife in 2010 to devote time to public affairs and development interest. She ran on the platform of the smaller Kowa Party, premising her campaign on a manifesto of a “New Nigeria, social welfare and modernism”.
 “It is time that somebody ordinary, a true representative of the people ran for president,” she said at the time. Even with the good intuitions and articulation of clear roadmap for the development of the country, she was only able to gather 13,078, against the 15,424,921 votes which nailed victory for president Buhari.
On account of her qualification and experience as a lawyer-cum development-consultant, Ayisha Osori, is best suited for the post of a parliamentarian. Frustrated that women were not running for political office, she made an assiduous attempt to clinch the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ticket to run for the House of Representatives seat for the MAX/Bwari constituency in Abuja in 2014. But the experience only served to confirm the base theories that politics in Nigeria is not designed for people with genuine interest in public service.
In a chat The Nation, Osori revealed that the biggest obstacle to women winning election in Nigeria is the unfair and undemocratic party process.
“It does matter how much a woman might be wanted by the constituency she wants to serve. What matters is the structure of the party and how they are designed by those who fund the party, because they choose the candidates. That, to me, is the biggest obstacle,” she said in a tone of finality.
Osori, also raised the point that the ethos surrounding Nigerian politics, which is often centered ‘hunting’ and ‘sharing’, debars women from aspiring for power in Nigeria’s governance space. On her resolve not throw in her weight for an elective position in 2019, she said: “I am not running because I am scared but because the process is fraudulent, and I am not the kind of person who wants to win in a fraudulent process. I would rather spend my energy trying to ensure the processes is fair and transparent”.
The former CEO of the Nigerian Women Trust Fund has documented her experience in a book titled, Love Does Not Win Election, which she describes as a manual for rookie politicians.
A system at odds with its women
Nigeria’s pre-colonial era is replete with the history of women who held kingdoms and subdued oppression. In the memoir, Ake, nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote of how women negated the draconian rule of a monarch in connivance with colonial masters. In other parts of the country, women were known to have occupied very influential political offices, including the highest political office (the King or the Oba) among the Yorubas; female individuals such as the Iyalode of Ibadan, Efunsetan Aniwura, Moremi of Ile-Ife, Queen Amina of Zaria, have held power position in pre-colonial history, research has shown.
For close observers of Nigerian history, the question to ask is at what point did women become sidelined in political power?
“The real African tradition respect its men and women,” said Olabisi Aina, a Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state, who maintained that the dwindling power space for women aspirants in Nigeria was an arrogation of the colonial masters
“The kind of kingdom that was run is what we call complementarity; they are not fighting each other nor looking for power from each other. When the colonial masters came, the ingredient that would have allowed women to be part of the political practice was never given to them,” Aina, a gender study expert said.
“For the British during the Victorian Era, all the money that the man had was used to decorate the woman to showcase wealth, so what you showcased was the way your wives and children dressed. As Africans, we did not have a tradition where woman didn’t work so what we think is our tradition was not our tradition.
“There was never a tradition in which the African man leaves his wife at home and goes to the farm; they were together at the farm working. They were both in the palace discussing the affairs of the state. The separation was when you first give education to the man and you didn’t give education to the woman until later. And when you give education to the woman, it was different from the one given to the man,” she stated.
Aina further said that British colonialists who came from the Victorian era recruited African male into colonial civil service, enshrining a practice which gave African male gender undue advantage over their opposite sex and thus marked the beginning of women under-representation in formal agencies of government.
Playing the Intellectual Card
The present political arrangement appears to be a disservice to women. This came into the fore in 2016 when a bill to foster gender equality, presented by Senator Biodun Olujimi, a female senator representing Ekiti was shut down with loud cries of “nay!”. The men who led the upper chamber shut down the bill which sought to erode discrimination in areas of marriage, divorce, education, employment opportunities, ownership of property and inheritance citing religion and tradition.
In crisis-ridden southern Kaduna, Ndi Kato, a young activist and advocate, has been championing reforms and compensation for the marginalized people of southern Kaduna. The graduate of the University of Jos, who runs the Dinidari Foundation, was inspired to run for political offices as a result of the crisis in her region and the inability of the government of the day to provide solutions.
“You need power to do the things you will need to do. Otherwise you will be left playing the intellectual card or writing books on things that you can actually help solve. I also feel that politics is for good people, so it is unwise for me to fold my hands and watch people that are unqualified rule while I do nothing about it. These are my reasons for participating in politics,” she told The Nation over the phone.
Kato, who is running for a seat in the Kaduna State House of Assembly on the platform of the PDP, is optimistic that her ambition would further help to inspire girls in the region where there are presently no women in the legislature.
Contesting in a party system where party primaries often involve a lot of lobbying and money politics, it’s left to be seen how far the 27-year-old young lady with a determined posture would go.
Reporting done with the support of CodeforNigeria’s Naija Data Ladies programme
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