By ERICJAMES OCHIGBO/NEFISHETU YAKUBU

Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Ogunwusi, and the Director-General of NILDS, Prof. Abubakar Sulaiman, have urged the National Assembly to approve Special Seats for Women Bill.

They said at one-day dialogue between Ooni and National Assembly legislators from the South-West zone that when passed and assented to, the law would expand political inclusion for Nigerian women across the federal and state legislatures.

The dialogue was convened by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) and UN-Women in Abuja.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the dialogue was attended by traditional rulers, parliamentarians, civil society groups and women leaders.

The aim was to advance advocacy for Special Seats for Women Bill and promote greater representation and gender balance in governance.

Ogunwusi said that women have leadership capacity and would contribute immensely to national development if given opportunity.

“We should give them more inclusion, more participation in anything we do. This initiative, I can assure you, is yielding a very positive result. It sounds like a tall dream.

“I am also looking forward to more women in the National Assembly, in the legislative arm. At some point too, we will climb over the executive arm.

“Someday, we will have women that will be governors,” he said.

The royal father tasked the First Lady of the nation, Sen. Oluremi Tinubu to sustain her track record in women and girl-child development by championing campaign for special women’s seat bill.

In his remarks, the Director-General of NILDS, Prof. Sulaiman said that the Special Seat Bill seeks to address the long-standing structural imbalance in Nigeria’s political representation.

He said it can be done by providing for a designated number of additional seats for women in both chambers of the National Assembly and the State Houses of Assemblies.

According to him, the proposal is in recognition that the existing constitutional and electoral frameworks have not yielded equitable gender outcomes, with women currently occupying less than 5 per cent of legislative seats nationally.

He said that the bill, therefore, represented a temporary but targeted affirmative action mechanism consistent with the principles of substantive equality enshrined in the Constitution and other international commitments.

“Indeed, across Africa, several countries have successfully implemented similar affirmative measures with transformative outcomes.

“Rwanda, for example, through its constitutional guarantee of a minimum of 30 per cent representation for women, now has one of the highest proportions of women in parliament globally; standing at more than 60 per cent.

“This deliberate policy shift has translated into more gender-responsive laws, including progressive legislation on inheritance rights and gender-based violence.

“Tanzania adopted a “special seats” model similar to the one proposed in Nigeria, reserving additional parliamentary positions for women.

“This has steadily increased women’s participation to about 37 per cent in the National Assembly, fostering inclusive policy debates and improving the representation of women’s perspectives in governance.

“In Uganda, the system of district women representatives has helped sustain women’s legislative visibility since the 1995 Constitution, creating a pipeline of female political leadership across sectors.

“Similarly, Senegal’s parity law, which requires political parties to field equal number of men and women on electoral lists, has elevated women’s representation to more than 40 per cent.

“Reshaping public decision-making and broadening social contract between citizens and government,” he said.

The professor said that the examples underscored a compelling reality that affirmative action worked.

He said that such initiative, when properly designed and implemented, enhanced not just women’s presence in politics but also the quality of democratic governance, legislative innovation and inclusive national development.

Sulaiman said that the women legislators across Africa had championed policies that addressed education, healthcare, social welfare and human security areas with direct impact on household well-being and societal stability.

Also, Mrs Ene Obi, a leading gender advocate, decried the male-dominated structure of Nigeria’s parliament, noting that only 20 out of 469 federal lawmakers were women in the 10th National Assembly.

She said that there were 16 women in the House of Representatives, four in the Senate and that in 14 State Houses of Assembly, not a single woman exists, yet there are committees on women that were chaired and manned entirely by men.

Obi said that Nigeria ranked among the last five countries globally on maternal mortality and warned that decisions affecting women cannot be effectively made without women at the table.

“Unless women are in the room, their issues will not be addressed as he who wears the shoes knows where it pinches,” she said. (NAN)