‘We are interested in the integrity of Nigerian women’

Are you not worried that the only position women were able to get in the National Assembly is deputy Minority Leader? The situation is worrisome and pathetic. With the saga and turnout of events at both the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is little we can do. Arrangements were made for women to […]

Are you not worried that the only position women were able to get in the National Assembly is deputy Minority Leader?
The situation is worrisome and pathetic. With the saga and turnout of events at both the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is little we can do. Arrangements were made for women to occupy some principal offices. Like in the Senate, we have a candidate that was coming for the position of the Deputy Senate President. We also had Khadija Bukar Abba in the House of Representatives who also showed interest in contesting for the position of Majority Leader. The party was mindful of how it could be worked out to support the affirmative action.
We are aware that in the 8th assembly, women participation has dropped. So we want to augment it by ensuring that women occupy the principal offices. Unfortunately, the quagmire we now find ourselves in the National Assembly has put us in a very difficult and tight corner. In the Senate, Binta actually opted to contest. But as you all know, the Senate of a country is not owned by a political party. There are Nigerians there with leadership capacity who came out to contest. Binta Kaoje contested. We ended up with just the position of the Minority Leader. We hope eventually some things could change so that women can hold some strategic committees. But we hope that the turnout of events would have been different.
The principal offices of the National Assembly have been shared out and women were left out. Are you looking towards ministerial appointments, what would you want the president to do in that regard?
Well, I believe he will do something. We have called upon him and paid him a courtesy visit. He saw what the women did and I know he appreciates women participation and their votes which helped to bring him into power and the support that he enjoys from the women and competence that came from the angle of the women.
 He must do something reasonable, even though the party is deriving a competence driven affirmative action. There are many women within the fold that he can appoint to occupy ministerial positions and also boards of parastatals.
According to the manifesto of the APC, can you elaborate on some programmes that concern women?
There are a lot of programmes that will affect the lives of the Nigerian women especially the downtrodden. We have various empowerment strategies that will reach out to the women at the grassroots through agriculture and other programmes. There is also the need for the amendment of the constitution in areas like the Land Use Act as it affects the women, the issues of land acquisition, the ‘Girls Child Rights Act’.
So many of these things were highlighted in the manifesto and the role of women was strongly emphasised in the society with their capacity building. For example, displaced families will be relocated and empowered. This administration will have to expedite action, but I know it will be based on the foundation, the re-structuring, the overhaul of the system which the president is working on. All the other things will be put in place through the agencies, and the Ministry of Women Affairs that will also be allowed to operate independently with a budget. This will enable these activities to commence and roll into the system and across.
Some parties have policies that allow women deputise for men in some positions. Is there anything that you have done so far to ensure that apart from the position of Women Leader, your party reserves some positions for women? 
There is no single party in Nigeria that has such an arrangement wherein when a man is the president the woman deputises or vice versa, but we have been agitating for more positions. We want that to be practiced in Nigeria. But actually, even in the seventh assembly and the senate, we struggled to get some of these things but it didn’t get through. I think that is part of the hurdles we have, especially with the men not supporting that in its totality. But then I hope that this government will rise up to the occasion by bringing some kind of measures to achieve this. They need to bring supporting policies that will encourage the political parties to make it a rule to make women deputies. Where you have the male as the chair or the head of an organisation, the deputy should be a woman. It is what we are agitating for. And if you look at it holistically, that is the only way we will be able to get the 35 percent affirmative action. 
One of the major challenges of this administration is corruption which it has promised to tackle. Many women have been indicted over corrupt practices. Are you not worried about this trend? 
I must challenge that notion about women being corrupt. All these are allegations and one is innocent until he or she is proven guilty. The ratio of women accused of corruption is decimal, but you have so many indicted men in the system, so many corrupt men, even established corrupt males in the system and that has not stopped the men from running our affairs and rising to the positions of leadership, so the few women that are addressed as corrupt are few and you know the women are just being principled.
Ordinarily, we should have called on the EFCC to reject all those corruption allegations about women not because we are saying they cannot be tried but because there are so many huge, verified financial crimes and all kinds of crimes perpetrated by the males. Why are they not starting with the men? This is not sitting well with the women, because we refuse to be indicted. For the fact that one or two women get indicted does not mean that women are all criminals.
The ratio of women in Nigeria and that of men is wide. But as of being worried, yes, we are worried. We are worried because of the dimension and the trend, the perceived trend of the EFCC. We want to steer clear of being used as political tool because when you want to get to a man in position, you get his wife. Just like what is happening, we don’t want to see that. That is why we are not protesting, we are watching keenly, we are very interested in the integrity and the image of the Nigerian women.