Women participation in the development process in Nigeria
Dec 16th, 2011 by admin
The way the Nigerian society is structured is sad because it is not favorable to the Nigerian woman. The fact is gender inequality still exists in certain sectors of the economy and is more on the side of women than men. So, given what is visibly a backward trend, women empowerment and sustainable growth must work towards favoring women despite existing traditions. Ada Agina-Ude, Executive director Gender and development action in Lagos Nigeria.
The Nigerian woman must recognize the fact that she has the potential to succeed. The society does not define her true worth. The subsisting issues which try to keep her down are numerous, but her desire to excel has seen her in recent times occupying sensitive positions. Truth be told, the Nigerian Woman is new in these positions as it takes a while for people to get into positions of authority but I must say that women who are into important positions like the finance minister etc in this country are doing quite well. That is not saying that a lot of them too, do not understand what the whole thing is about. Our worry is that women represent ing Nigeria in various public offices and I want to say it is not only a Nigerian experience , this is an experience that has being recorded everywhere not just in Africa because I read about a similar thing in the United Kingdom. We discover that because of not being grounded in gender issues, a lot of the women when they get into public offices do not really understand that besides the general issues there are women issues. If women do not take up their issues, who will take it up. This is a crucial point that women in positions have overlooked. Some of them because of lack of knowledge and understanding do not think it necessary to take up these issues, issues in the area of health, certain health issues are peculiar to women simply because they are women, an example is high maternal death rate in Nigeria; it is the second largest in the whole world.
These women get there and believe because she is either Minister of health or she is being elected by her constituency, her entire duty is about the whole community, so she starts talking probably about health clinics all over the place and never really talks about maternity, she is not asking questions on how the ugly situation can be erased, neither is she concerned as a woman to make sure this high maternal death rate is reduced. The truth is death arising from complications of pregnancy and childbirth is very common in the country. Rather, when you listen to them in parliament they are just rehearsing some of the issues that are quite general whereas women issues suffer.
Even in some cases when civil societies bring up a bill and it gets sponsors into parliament, you find the women are either scared or not very equipped to take up such issues. There is an example of the bill to demonstrate the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women in Nigeria. Nigeria rectified it as far back as 1985 when former President Ibrahim Babangida came into power. The chairperson of the women’s committee in the National Assembly was working on it, until she got to a point where she was overwhelmed by religious issues and she back peddled and up to now I do not think there has being any person bold enough to chairpion it. There was also the health bill, which Daisy Danjuma who was representing a senatorial district in Edo state took up. She was called all sorts of names; they called it the abortion bill. The whole thing was about women’s health rights, and it was actually meant to address the maternal death rate and other complications women face because they are on women and of course, she was alone. They were writings in the papers abusing her, saying she was promoting prostitution and abortion. The other women could not care less.
At the moment I can say there is an emphases on women participation but it is not just increasing the number of women in public offices, there is also the need to create awareness in them, to sensitize them on women issues because we know there are some gender sensitive men who will stand firmly and defend women issues and bills that concern women matters.
EDUCATION AND THE NIGERIAN WOMAN?
They are having the education and because of education, so many areas are being opened up for them because like in politics we have minimum education to qualify for any position that you want to aspire to. Having said that, I think that public office seems to be most glaring. On women economy, it is not improving even with education, and we think the education is somehow skewed because you see with science and technology; education is actually deteriorating in Nigeria because of traditional attitudes that say it is not for women. If it is deteriorating, it is more for women so at the end of the day you will find that it is not easy for women to get what you call decent work even though they are educated. So, their economy is going down because economic position is not commensurate with increase in education. Again, it has to do with the general economy of the country , at the end of the day men have a head start, they inherit property from their parents, they have many opportunities here and there, chronism and school matism which women lose by changing their last names. So men are still doing better.
We had hoped that 2011 political landscape for women would be better. Unfortunately, it is worse when compared to 2007 because we did not see a spectacular increase in the number of women participation in politics. At least at the national level and this is very sad because public office is where decisions are made about our lives and it is important women participate and their participation should reflect in whatever decisions are being taken
WHY WAS THIS SO?
Like I said earlier, women are not even familiar with women issues but the sad situation is the decreasing number of women actively involved in public office. The important issue at the end of the day is to give support to women in their aspirations particularly in the area of creating awareness. If I begin to talk about political parties in Nigeria, you will understand why women have no chance. For instance, the lack of democratic practices within political parties is an issue for concern. That dictatorship thrives in Nigerian political parties where this is supposed to be a democratic society (country) is sad, In any case, how do we run the political parties and how do we pick candidates. We have spoken about affirmative action because affirmative action has been practiced in other countries and we know by research that it is the fastest way to increase women participation in public offices but somehow in Nigeria there is a very serious opposition to it because in Nigeria, politics is a do or die matter. If you decide to give women whatever percentage, it means you have excluded men from there and the men are so desperate about this thing.
However, some discussions have been held with each party claiming that they do not charge women nomination fees, that they are generally favorable towards women. Women on the other hand prefer to pay the fees so they would be regarded as full-fledged members of the political parties that the fact that the political party says they should not pay this or that is quite patronizing. When the time comes they actually look to the side of the people who have been financing the political party so women who have been having things easy in quote, are not looked at as candidates. There are also issues of societal expectations why do they think a woman cannot be Governor or President for instance? The solution is women should be groomed from their political parties.
HOW FAVORABLE DISPOSED, ARE THE POLITICAL PARTIES TO FEMALE CANDIDATES THEN?
If you look at their manifesto, it is like every political party virtually promised that they would do something to empower women to enable them contest but we have not seen that. Parties have the usual practice of giving appointments here and there; women are not remembered so how do you empower them.
IN THE AREA OF ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT, HOW ARE WOMEN DOING?
In the area of economic empowerment, we took up promoting agriculture, export based agriculture and we took up cassava. Are women really involved in cassava export? We found out that women are mainly processors, they farm and they process into garri etc. We found that men are into the export of cassava and we did a research to find out if women are aware of the policy in cassava export. Unfortunately, they are not aware of it. Again, women are the people that plant cassava but the men are aware of the policy, so they buy the cassava from the women at ridiculously low prices and they export the cassava and make huge profits. So, the economy of the women has not improved even with the incentives on export agriculture.
Having worked with open society initiatives of West Africa on trade, women and gender trade particularly trade policies. The general idea is finding how responsive Nigerian women are and how they are profiting, benefitting from this policy. It is an ongoing process.
Nigerian women are great.
Nigerian women have come of age…..