This minute, Nigeria pulses to fluid femaleness. Next minute, fluidity may surge trapped, and femaleness, bland, as the sharp lance turns blunt in the hands of the worn knight.
Thus goes the rite of hierarchies by which a dominant male divide, harness female spunk to win elections.
How do politicians define a woman with a voter’s card? As manipulable muscle perhaps. In truth, she is a worker of marvels. She is a peasant farmer and market woman of the sidewalk. She is a maternal hero and guardian of fruits from errant male loins. She is the spangled artisan mining the dreams of those that would put her in fetters.
A shackled woman is a shackled nation; repressed womanhood often manifests dangerously; recent figures by the National Population Commission (NPC) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), estimate Nigeria at 193 million people with approximately 51 percent males and 49 percent females.
The figures hardly translate in favour of women in governance and elective positions.
For instance, women recorded low representation at the 2015 general elections, securing a paltry 6.2 percent (seven female senators) of seats in the Senate while men constituted 93.8 percent. Only six women emerged as deputy governors in the 36 states of the country and no woman was elected governor.
At the backdrop of this worrisome narrative, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, revealed that more men voted than women in 2015, thus bemoaning the marked decrease in the number of women who have won elective positions since 2007: 11 percent in 2007, seven percent in 2011 and 5.6 percent in 2015.
In 2015, only 44 percent of female voters were accredited to vote compared to 56 percent male voters, he said.
Thus Mufuliat Fijabi, founder of the Nigerian Women’s Trust Fund (NWTF), pleads for a level playing field with men, stressing, that women can excel and contribute immensely to the advancement of democratic governance in Nigeria.
Again, Nigeria pulses to this frantic fiction of change; as INEC, civil and women’s rights groups demand greater women participation in politics.
But getting more women involved in politics, portend no solution at a short stretch, rather greater attention should be paid to the quality of their political awareness.
Unlike her male counterpart, the female voter is modern politics’ most significant personae; a reckoning of phenomenal realities, she possesses immense power yet untapped.
Crucial questions should be asked: What is the pattern of votes cast by women? Who are their preferred candidates? What’s the quality of their electoral decision?
Are they rooting for” the candidate who always delivers?” What are the poetics of such delivery? Or are they clamouring to re-elect the candidate who bought them pepper grinders, ice coolers, ankara and bread loaves during the last general elections?
I remember an encounter with two female voters and neighbours, whose recent ‘upgrade’ to minor party chieftains at the grassroots excites them. Both are victims of “irresponsible baby daddies” and they are working for an aspirant, seeking to represent their constituency for the third time, at the federal legislative chambers.
At the latter’s first tenure, he promised them a borehole that never got built. At his second time out, however, he pleaded for forgiveness and bought pepper grinding machines, ice coolers and food warmers for women across the local districts of their constituency.
This time around, brandishing a hazy list of beneficiaries, he promises to give their children scholarships, valued at N20, 000 each. Of the figure, the recipient will pay a commission of N5, 000 to the woman leader, who facilitates the inclusion of her child’s name in the list of recipients. They have vowed to get him re-elected at all costs.
The duo is a fragment of a larger percentage of females, who like their male peers, are blinded by an insidious culture of tokenism, to gaping inadequacies of their preferred candidates and the consequences on the economic, social, and political structures that herald their lives.
They do not understand, that, these structures, which they have been tutored to serve, must be abolished to avoid disaster. The bane of such female voter divide is their handlers. Political parties activate their campaign teams with influential females answering to the title of ‘women leader.’
The latter flaunt the lustre of folk heroines and local champions, who develop multiple forms of sentiments in the female populace, exploiting emotionality for political benefits.
Some evolve into the political femme fatale, committing to their parties’ candidate irrespective of the latter’s true ethical bent. They play the devil’s advocate, showering plaudits and heroism on aspirants, whose lives are often examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed.
Local politics careens dangerously by the antics of such femme fatale, who survive by the mystique of an equation akin to politics of the herdsmen and the herd.
Women constitute a significant and very powerful section of the political divide no doubt. Societal problems, however, persist where they fail to wield their power and influence decisively in their interest and for the benefit of the country.
The social afflictions of inadequate primary healthcare centres, substandard education, gender violence, and economic insecurity persist, where women fail to participate in national, state and grassroots politics by their own terms
It is often argued that if more women get into politics, there would be less failure and tragedy in governance. This argument, however, falls flat on the face at the backdrop of revelations of monumental corruption perpetrated by female public officers at all levels of government.
Yet it may be argued that the culprits are victims of an interplay and intra-play of forces led by powerful male elements holding sway over public and private institutions.
Leadership failure is undoubtedly a male sport, invented by the politically dominant male to patent victory by the choices of a hapless electorate. In order to fulfill this dysfunction and make it amenable to modern precepts of political correctness, the Nigerian female is occasionally tossed political office, like a gift of bone to a starving dog.
Thus the emergence of often ceremonial female deputies and commissioners to male governors – even though their functions at times, conflict with the offices of their principals’ First Ladies. Such deputy governors, commissioners at the end, settle into roles and functions beneath their designations.
This is a manifestation of flawed choice, an ultimate human dilemma, precipitated by survival instinct, in a blemished system. The gravest challenge to our hopes and dreams as a nation, are the messy political transactions prevalent at the grassroots and party arena, every minute and hour of every day.
More women suffer the scourge of tarnished awareness in a political high drama that renders their conscience, a pitiful hostage of its flesh envelope; “whose surges and secret murmurings they cannot stay or speed,” says Paglia.
If the woman’s body is truly a labyrinth in which the man is lost, the Nigerian woman should loom formidably and intimidatingly over him as negotiations intensify on the country’s next social, political hierarchies. The conflict of economies and social ironies notwithstanding,
A new class of womanhood must emerge not as a corpse in future argument with itself, but as a heroic shiner of light and hope on Nigeria’s dark aspects.
