A FORMER member of the House of Representatives, Nnenna Ukeje, has called on the National Assembly to pass the Special Seats Bill to give room for more female participation in governance.
Ukeje made the appeal while speaking at the 23rd Daily Trust Dialogue held on Thursday, January 22, in Abuja. The dialogue was themed “Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: What is working and what is not.”
The former lawmaker highlighted Nigeria’s poor record on women’s political representation, saying the imbalance continued to affect democratic governance and development outcomes.
“Nigeria has a historically low representation of women in political office, generally under six per cent, and was ranked 139th out of 156 countries in the gender equality matrix,” she said.
She noted that women remained marginally represented across elective offices nationwide.
According to her, Nigeria currently has four women in the 109 member Senate and 17 women in the 360 member House of Representatives, adding that at the state level, several Houses of Assembly operate without a single female lawmaker.
She said Nigeria’s figures fall below the African regional average of about 23.4 per cent and the global average of 26.1 percent for women in parliament, despite women accounting for nearly half of the population.
She recalled the early years of Nigeria’s return to democracy, when she said women held strategic appointive positions between 1999 and 2003 and delivered notable outcomes.
“When the population is underrepresented in decision-making, development, and governance, outcomes inevitably suffer. This is not merely a gender issue, it is governance failure. Evidence consistently shows that societies that include women in leadership experience better social, stronger community trust, more sustainable development,” she said.
She linked the continued low representation of women in governance to the failure of reforms such as the special seat bill for women, noting that exclusion from decision making affects policy outcomes, institutional trust and democratic performance.
“Legislative interventions, such as the Special Seats Bill, which has been presented in the last three assemblies, the 8th, the 9th, and the 10th assemblies, have failed to get the desired legislative votes to achieve the affirmative action required to close the embarrassing gender gaps. The National Assembly will do well to seize this opportunity to etch its name glowingly in the annals of Nigeria’s history by passing the Special Seats Bill to allow for more female participation in governance.”
Special Seats Bill
The ICIR reports that the Special Seats Bill proposes the reservation of additional legislative seats exclusively for women in Nigeria’s National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly.
The objective is to guarantee a minimum threshold of female representation and ensure that women’s perspectives are consistently reflected in the country’s lawmaking process.
To achieve this, the bill seeks to amend the 1999 Constitution to create new, women-only seats at both federal and state legislative levels.
Under the proposed legislation, one special seat each is proposed for women in the Senate and the House of Representatives for every state and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), amounting to 74 additional seats nationwide.
At the state level, the bill proposes three special seats for women in each State House of Assembly, bringing the total to 108 additional seats across the country.
While there have been claims of delayed passage, the bill has successfully passed Second Reading in the House of Representatives and has been referred to the House Committee on Constitution Review for further consideration.
Mustapha Usman is an investigative journalist with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting. You can easily reach him via: musman@icirnigeria.com. He tweets @UsmanMustapha_M