It’s a long walk for women

At the height of its popularity, Newswatch magazine published a special edition to celebrate some outstanding Nigerian women proving their mettle in commerce and industry and the academia. We were beginning to hear foot steps along the corridor and their voices loud and clear in the board rooms. We felt it was worth celebrating them, if only to serve notice that the invasion of the men’s world had begun and the kitchen would become increasingly too small a space for those women achievers and their successor generations. We most aptly titled the cover story, The Women Are Coming. We knew what we were talking about, believe me.

I wish to report that the women have not yet arrived where it matters most - political leadership. They are still coming, obviously. It is a long walk. Their climb up the ladder of our national politics has been agonisingly slow. I looked at their movement from the First Republic to the current fourth republic and saw them putting on a brave face on their weary trek along the path of political power. Being a particularly gender-sensitive man, (ignore the sound of chest beating), I was shocked to see how long they have trekked and how short the distance they covered so far in more than half a century of our independence.

We need no reminder that it took the Israelites some 40 years to move from Egypt to the promised land. They had no motor vehicles. They trekked or trudged, more like it, through forests, rivers and deserts. On the other hand, even with the state of the art motor vehicles at their disposal, it has taken our women much longer to approach the gates of political power.

The first republic boasted of formidable women activists who, against the odds of the maledominated world at the time, courageously fought for women’s rights and emancipation. Thanks to them, women were eventually given the right to vote and to be voted for. On the roll call are Mrs Margaret Ekpo, Mrs Funmi Ransome-Kuti and Hajia Gambo Sawaba, all of whom are now late. They dared and today, despite the long trek, our women are the better for it. Yet, despite their struggle to better the lot of women in our country then, only one woman made it into the federal parliament where laws for the good governance of the republic were made. Mrs Wuraola Esan, the lone but not lonely woman, was a nominated senator from Ibadan West.

When the khaki politicians kindly yielded place to the agbada politicians in 1979, the women managed to get into the national assembly with the election of a female senator, Franca Afegbua (NPN, Bendel North) in 1983. She threw stones at the glass ceiling as the first elected female senator in the land. The glass did not break, let alone shatter.

Here is some evidence. We begin the quest for an answer from the national assembly. Of the 109 distinguished senators representing the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory in the 8th senate, we have only seven women. We had eight of them in the 7th senate. Instead of gaining, they lost. Trust our chauvinistic men.

PDP produced four of the seven female senators and APC three in 2015. With the political ground constantly shifting, as in defections, I would not hazard how the two parties now stand, female-senators wise.

I checked the distribution of the female senators to see which state is the most gender sensitive. Well, the prize goes to Anambra State with two senators: Stella Odua (Anambra North) and Uche Ekwunife (Anambra Central). Lagos has the only ranking senator among them: Oluremi Tinubu (Lagos Central). The rest are: Cross River State 1: Rose Oko (Cross River North); Adamawa 1: Binta Garba (Adamawa North); Monsurat Jumoke Sunmonu (Oyo Central) and Ekiti 1: Fatimat Raji-Rasaki. Of the three northern geo-political zones only Adamawa elected a woman into the senate. Now you know what the states think of women.

Women are even numerically more disadvantaged in the House of Representatives. There are only 22 of them out of the 360 honourable members. Only one woman has made it to the top in the national assembly. When Patricia Etteh was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007, I celebrated it with a glass of undiluted palm wine. But she lasted for all of five months from June to October 2007. The national assembly boasts of female leadership deficit.

The lot of the women politicians is worse in the state houses of assembly. At the inception of this democratic dispensation in 1999, Benue State house of assembly made history by electing the first female speaker of a state legislature in the land. But Mrs Margaret Ichen suffered the same fate that befell Etteh some years later. Her time as the number three citizen in the state ended before you could say swange.

Both Oyo and Ogun state houses of assembly elected female speakers. Senator Monsurat Jumoke Sunmonu was the immediate last speaker of Oyo State legislature. None of them has a female speaker now. Only Anambra State has a female speaker: Honourable Rita Maduabu.

We do not have a woman calling the shots in any one of the 36 government houses in the country as state governor. In 2015, Hajia Aisha Alhassan became the first woman in the north to contest the governorship election. She bravely took on the men in Taraba State. She was brave but she failed to make history. She is in the race again this year. When a woman takes no for an answer, do not permit a smirk to dwell for too long on your face.

The south-west geo-political zone is the only zone I can see that is profoundly gender sensitive. No woman in the state has made it to the government house like in the rest of the country, but at least four or five of them were a hot breath away from the mansions where the people’s servants do not serve but are served. Lagos, Osun and Ekiti have had female deputy governors. Lagos has had three since 1999. Women politicians in the other five geo-political zones - North-Central, North-West, North-East, South-East and South-South - must be jealous of the better lot of their counterparts in the land that Oduduwa gave to the Yoruba. Tell the women I understand their feeling.

Given the nature of our national politics, I advise you not to cross your fingers in the fervent but forlorn hope that when tomorrow arrives with the sun miraculously rising from the west, we would have a madam president. Aso Rock is an intimidating fortress. No, that is not why Oby Ezekwesili suddenly buried her presidential ambition just when we thought the women were at the gate. She had other reasons.

Would my generation live to see a woman leading her husband by the hand to enter that fortress with the man being addressed as his excellency, the president’s husband? Well, things happen. It would be nice too to witness a gender swap in the fortified political power house. But I know that Thomas Paine would argue that this would not be in accord with the natural order of things. He knew something about natural order of things and was thus able to persuade the Americans to eject the assumed right of an island to rule a continent.