POLITICS-NIGERIA: Female Presidential Hopeful Throws Her Hat into the Ring

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Jan 14 2003 (IPS) - Nigeria’s first female presidential aspirant, Sarah Jubril will challenge 29 men, including incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo, in the April presidential poll.

Jubril, a long-time politician, was unanimously adopted as her party’s candidate during a convention held in Abuja, the administrative capital of Nigeria, at the weekend.

Jubril, who has been aiming at the presidency since 1992, is sponsored by newly registered but less known Progressive Action Congress (PAC).

‘’The wind of change is in favour of the progressives. A government of the true progressives is the answer. Therefore, this is not the time to give up, but a time to think positive towards a better tomorrow,” she said, while accepting her nomination.

‘’The nomination of Mrs Jubril is a plus at least; it will ginger women to renew their hope. But, generally speaking, I do not see her as making any impact,” says Toro Oladapo of Women in Nigeria (WIN), a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

‘’Mrs Jubril was a presidential aspirant of the disbanded National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and came fourth (in 1992). She knows she cannot achieve her ambition of standing as a presidential candidate in big parties. Hence, she went to a party she knows she can manipulate and get a ticket easily,” Oladapo claims.

‘’Nobody in the big parties, where men hold sway, would have given her the chance. It is all a joke, she knows she cannot win. It is still a man’s game in Nigeria,” says Oladapo.

But Yetunde Gandonou, of the Lagos-based National Council of Women Societies, has pledged to mobilise women to contribute ‘morally’ and ‘financially’ to make Jubril’s bid at the April polls a success.

‘’We do not want the military to come back through the backdoor to politics. We have to do something to ensure they are not back whether as civilians or military. We are going to mobilise our womenfolk to vote for Mrs Jubril,” Gandonou told IPS this week.

President Obasanjo and, his main rival, Muhammadu Buhari were both army Generals and former military rulers.

Nigeria has 30 political parties, which are expected to submit their nomination lists to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), following last week’s primaries in which presidential candidates were elected.

For two years, Nigeria’s big political parties – the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP) and the Alliance for Democracy (AD) – have promised female members a level playing field.

They also exempted female aspirants from paying nomination fees, which range from 250,000 Naira (about 2,500 U.S. dollars) to 10 million Naira (about 100,000 U.S. dollars) depending on the position being contested.

However, when federal government primaries were taking place, the major parties shoved aside their female aspirants, prompting accusations of alleged marginalisation of female politicians.

The ploy prompted 400 PDP female aspirants to invade Abuja on Jan 9 to complain about their marginalisation.

Chidima Ibe-Ejiogu, a parliamentary aspirant, alleges no primary was held in her constituency in eastern Nigeria, where, she claims, ‘’doctored” list of voters was presented.

Ejiogu, who claims she has been a member of the ruling PDP since its inception, says she was marginalised simply because she did not make the compulsory donation of 250,000 Naira (about 2,500 U.S. dollars) to the party.

‘’It is hard to believe that men, who said women should not pay fees to contest, can now turnaround and frustrate them,” she says. ‘’If the PDP wants to win the general elections in April, our grievances must be addressed”.

Kofo Olugesan, another female aspirant from Lagos, claims she defeated a male colleague in local council elections, but that the PDP electoral committee refused to declare the results ‘’because there was no electricity and the votes could not be counted”.

‘’Justice must be done,” she told President Obasanjo when the protesting PDP women sought the intervention of the Nigerian leader last week.

Obasanjo pledged to support any change in the party’s constitution to provide increased opportunity for women candidates in future election.

‘’What you have to do is to persuade the men folk to allow you (to) participate, because we are in a male-dominated society and change would not be easy,” he told the women.

Nigeria’s 360-member House of Representatives has 12 female members, while the 109-member Senate has three. Political observers and women groups argue that – going by the primaries of the various parties in which women aspirants have lost out – there might be fewer women in the national assembly, come April, in the two houses.

‘’The prospect of having as many women in the national assembly this time around looks bleak. Only one female senatorial candidate has emerged from the PDP, which claimed to have offered both male and female aspirants a level playing field,” Oladapo says.

‘’Most of the women were screened out through various styles of adoption and handpicking,” she says. ‘’A lot of women also edged out of the race because of the unfavourable policies that are introduced at the party level’ ‘.

She says the exemption of paying fees is a ploy to attract women to join political parties. ‘’The wavers are just decors to attract them to join political parties,” says Oladapo.

Nigeria, she says, is ripe for a woman president, but the odds in the country’s politics, she warns, will make it impossible for a woman to clinch the top job.

‘’The existing odds are still there. Unless we start fighting seriously for affirmative action, which offers 30 percent of all public offices to women, we will not achieve our goals. We (NGOs) did a lot of mobilisation and sensitisation of women, but a wide gulf still exists between men and women,” Oladapo says.

She urged the next federal government to implement the long-awaited 30 percent affirmative action through appointment of women at various levels of state and local governments.

To the chagrin of women, Nigeria has only six women – out of 42 ministers in the federal cabinet – serving under President Obasanjo.