FARIDA ODANGI- SULEIMAN
Farida Odangi- Suleiman is a faculty and Estate Manager. She started her educational aspiration at the Jabi Primary School-Jabi and later, Federal Government Girl College -Bwari, Abuja. She further went to Federal University Of Technology (B.Tech): Estate Management after which she had her National Youth Service Corp Experience then enrolled for her Masters Of Technology (M.Tech): Environmental Impact Assessment.
In 2014/2015, she was a member of the Youth Mobilization Directorate APC Presidential Campaign Council. In 2016, she was a member APC North Central Investigation Committee as the Benue State Chairman. In 2018, she was appointed a member of the Ekiti Election Council Committee. She was a member of the election Planning and Monitoring Directorate, 2019 APC Presidential Campaign Council (PCC). She was a member of APC National Campaign Council (NCC) for Edo Gubernatorial Election in 2020. In 2020 also, she was a member of, APC National Campaign Council (NCC) for Ondo Gubernatorial Elections. In 2021, she became a member of, APC Registration & Validation Committee, Edo State.
Since your foray into politics, have you at any time, felt disadvantaged or treated unfairly because of your sex and what advice will you give to encourage women to play more active roles in politics.
I will like to encourage Nigerian women to join politics because politics is the only space we can make, drive and implement policies that will affect the lives of Nigerian women. If you stay outside the fence, men will be making the policies and we will continue to complain and constantly have issues just like what happened when the bill got to the national assembly. You can imagine if we had more women as representatives in the national assembly, that bill will have passed without all those hitches. I want to advise women professionals to join politics because that is the only way we can change the narrative, the only way we can take our leadership from people that are not qualified and experienced to lead us, people that don’t understand what it takes to make policies, laws and bills that will affect the life of an ordinary citizen. So, for me, these are the reasons I joined politics because I am a professional, I am an estate surveyor by profession, I am an EI expert, but I saw that without being part and parcel of policymaking implementation, we will not see that Nigeria of our dreams. The fact that you are just working and earning a salary, you can own a house, you can have a befitting health system, you can have access to good roads which will be possible with professionals in the political space. This is what prompted me to join politics and the journey so far has not been easy. I have not even achieved what I want to achieve yet, but we are moving gradually and we thank God so far for it. Of course, being a woman, we all know, not just in the political space even in the professional space, has a way of hindering us (gender-wise) but we are pushing through and have continued to lend our voices out there that our gender should not limit us, it should be about our capacity, capability and content. It should be about what we can bring to the table and not about your sex or how God had created you. For me Yes! My gender has in one way or the other, affected my political pace, but I am not losing. I will continue to push and lend my voice. We are Africans and as religious as we are, we know how these things have affected the growth of women politically.