WOMEN turned out in large numbers in Abuja on Monday to protest and demand the passage of a bill that would create more seats for women in the Senate and House of Representatives.
One of the protest organisers, Dorothy Njemanze, said women’s groups across the country converged on Abuja with over 1,000 women making their demand in a peaceful protest.
“We want the legislature to work for women,” Njemanze said.
Nyiyam Ikyereve, who travelled from Benue State to join the protest said a National Assembly with more women might better focus on women’s health and economic inclusion.
While several African countries, from Senegal to Rwanda, have boosted women’s representation in parliament through quota systems, Nigeria without such a system has only four women in the 109-member Senate and 16 in the 360-member House of Representatives.
The “Special Seats Bill” aims to amend the Constitution to reserve 10 per cent of National Assembly seats for women and five per cent for persons with disabilities (PWDs) across Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
However, in its legislative analysis, Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC) cautioned that constitutional amendments are “no walk in the park,” requiring approval from two-thirds of the National Assembly as well as 24 state legislatures.
Protesters on Monday argued that reserved seats would help counter financial barriers, entrenched gender norms, and the dominance of male power brokers that have long excluded women from politics in Africa’s most populous nation.
The protest ended with the submission of signatures, including that of the Minister of Women’s Affairs, Hajiya Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, in support of the legislation to a House committee reviewing constitutional reform.
The ICIR reported in July, that the House of Assembly Speaker, Tajudeen Abbas, said the proposal was part of the ongoing constitutional review process.
If passed, the proposal would add 82 seats to the National Assembly – 55 in the House of Representatives and 28 in the Senate.
The Senate currently has 109 constitutionally mandated seats, with three representatives from each of the 36 states and one from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The House of Representatives has 360 seats allocated based on each state’s population size.
In the current 10th National Assembly, which has 469 constitutionally mandated members, only 20 are women, four in the Senate and 16 in the House of Representatives making up just 4.2 per cent.
This reflects a drop from the 9th National Assembly, which had 21 women, eight in the Senate and 13 in the House. The figure is lower than in the 8th Assembly, which recorded eight women in the Senate and 15 in the House.
This decline persists despite women making up nearly half of Nigeria’s registered voters – about 44.4 million out of the 96.2 million on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) register.
Nanji is an investigative journalist with the ICIR. She has years of experience in reporting and broadcasting human angle stories, gender inequalities, minority stories, and human rights issues. She has documented sexual war crimes in armed conflict, sex for grades in Nigerian Universities, harmful traditional practices and human trafficking.