Our women deserve more than they receive. It’s time to review the trend.

Women and girls make up approximately 49.3 percent of Nigeria’s population. They cultivate their farms, run their markets, raise their children, support their future. Therefore, what they deserve, what this nation owes them, is the ordinary dignity of equal citizenship. At this time when we require the contribution of each citizen for the peace and prosperity of our country, we cannot continue with one hand tied behind the national back. The cost of excluding women and girls is not paid by them alone, it is paid by all of us, in a development deficit that worsens with each electoral cycle that we let pass without correction. As the world celebrates International Women’s Day 2026 with the theme “Giving to Earn”, Nigerians must embrace the fact that when they give generously, women and girls get fairer treatment.

On this International Women’s Day, we salute Nigerian women for their resilience. They have had to be extraordinary just to stay in the room. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Nigeria is currently ranked 180th out of 185 countries assessed globally in terms of women’s representation in parliament. In sub-Saharan Africa, a region not exactly known for its traditions of feminist governance, Nigeria is in last place. The region average is 27.3 percent. Rwanda, our continental example, has achieved 61.3 percent women in its legislature. Sierra Leone enacted a Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Act in 2023 and within months women won 30.4 percent of parliamentary seats. And yet, in the Tenth National Assembly, women hold a total of 19 of 469 available seats. This is 3.8 percent. Four sit in the Senate; 15 in the House of Representatives. Expand the lens to include our 36 State Assemblies and the image will only darken. In the 1,460 legislative, federal and state seats combined, women hold 64 positions. As the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, himself recently acknowledged, these 64 women are expected to represent the hopes, rights and interests of over 100 million Nigerian women. No reasonable mind can defend this as democracy.

The image of the executive arm tells the same story. In the country’s 36 states, women hold only nine percent of political positions overall. Since the return to civilian rule in 1999, not a single woman has been elected governor of any of Nigeria’s 36 states. Not one. In 26 years of uninterrupted democracy, which in itself is a feat we celebrate, not a single state in this federation of 250 ethnic groups, of lawyers, professors, technocrats and activists, has elected a woman to its highest executive office. When President Bola Tinubu formed his cabinet, 18 percent of ministers were women, a figure that gender advocates rightly pointed out was not up to par with the commitments of the election campaign that preceded it. Our National Gender Policy, which this government, like all previous governments, aims to respect, prescribes a minimum of 35 per cent representation of women in both elected and appointed positions. We are not halfway there. We haven’t gone even a quarter of the way. We are a fraction of a fraction and we talk about it as if it were a minor administrative inconvenience rather than a structural failure of governance.

Critical stakeholders must accept the fact that restricting access to opportunities that ultimately empower women who constitute about 50 percent of the Nigerian population is counterproductive to the development of our society. Rebuilding Nigeria requires decisions, starting this year, in party primaries, candidate evaluations and legislative chambers. It requires men willing to share power because they finally understood what we can all gain from it.

Therefore, as Nigeria joins the rest of the world in commemorating International Women’s Day 2026, we must celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of our mothers, sisters and daughters. But we also need an institutional mechanism to strategically address all the impediments imposed on them. That is the only way to assure our women that we care about their well-being and the prosperity of our country.

Appointment

We must celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of our mothers, sisters and daughters. But we also need an institutional mechanism to strategically address all the impediments imposed on them.