Highlighting the strength of women in the 2023 elections

Over the years, the Nigerian political space has been dominated by men despite the fact that women constitute a powerful electorate with millions of votes in elections.

In the just-concluded Osun State gubernatorial election which gave Senator Ademola Adeleke as the winner, women voters made up 52.76%, while men made up 47.24% .

In the 2019 general elections, women made up approximately 47.14% (39,598,645 million) of the 84,004.084 million registered voters nationwide.

Although data on permanent voter cards (PVCs) collected for the 2019 elections was not disaggregated by sex, available data on voter turnout in the 2015 presidential election show that housewives constituted the third highest group out of the nine groups that voted. In 2015, 3,667,076 housewives voted in the presidential election, standing alongside students (4,480,708) and civil servants (4,628,433). Similarly, housewives rank third on the list of registered voters by group in the 2019 elections. ) and students (26.57%). This figure does not include the millions of women in the various other groups. Unfortunately, during campaigns, public discourse has excluded serious and sustained engagement of women's concerns, except for the usual promises to “take care of our” women by politicians and their agents. In addition, the spouses of presidential and gubernatorial candidates have a responsibility to reach out to women, a task considered non-essential to the success of the campaign. You begin to wonder how vote-chasing parties could be dismissive of women with millions of potential votes. In one of its stakeholder meetings, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) kicked in against what it described as the marginalization of women in the political space, imploring political parties to give preference for the female sex during their primaries. He underscored the need for women to break down the barriers of being just contenders for candidates, while advising women to be aware of the electoral strength they possess, given their population. The commission argued that the active participation of women in politics would strengthen the country's democratic process, pointing out that the electoral arbiter had started the process of gender inclusion by creating a specific department to achieve the goal. Meanwhile, four years after a group of female parliamentarians visited President Muhammadu Buhari in 2018 to ask him to consider choosing a female vice-presidential candidate ahead of the 2019 presidential election, which did not yielded no results, a women's group from the All Progressives Congress (APC) is insisting that the vice-president position of the party's presidential candidate be reserved for a woman. Hajiya Zainab Ibrahim, women's leader, raised the need for the selection of a woman as Bola Tinubu's running mate. She said: “We have the competence to hold the seat of vice-president and we have formally made requests to the relevant districts for this purpose and are only waiting for the response. “We have requested top-down arrangements in allocating tickets for elective positions for Nigerian women. We should be considered for the Deputy Governor's seat, the National Assembly and even the Vice President's ticket. There had also been calls for Labor presidential candidate Peter Obi to consider a woman as his running mate. Senator Binta Garba was previously expected to serve as Tinubu's running mate before choosing Senator Kashim Shettima. Garba, a politician from the North East and also a Christian, won the elections in Kaduna and Adamawa states.