Power, representation, and Nigeria’s unfinished struggle for gender equality in politics
Every year, International Women’s Day offers an opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements while reflecting on the structural barriers that continue to shape their participation in public life. Yet beneath the language of celebration lies a persistent governance dilemma: women’s readiness to lead increasingly exceeds the willingness of political institutions to accommodate them.
The paradox can be expressed bluntly: women are ready, men are afraid.
This is not an accusation against individual men. It is a structural observation about power. Across political systems, the evidence increasingly shows that women possess the competence, experience, and civic commitment required for leadership. What remains contested is whether the institutions that allocate power, political parties, legislatures, and community governance structures, are prepared to share it.
Nigeria illustrates this tension vividly. Women constitute nearly half of the country’s population, yet their representation in political institutions remains among the lowest in the world. Following the 2023 general elections, women occupy less than five percent of seats in the National Assembly. This disparity persists despite decades of advocacy, policy commitments, and reform proposals aimed at improving women’s participation in governance.
Globally, the pattern is similar though less extreme. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, women currently hold about 26 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide. Progress has been made, but the pace remains slow relative to the scale of change required for parity.
Importantly, the global experience shows that representation gaps rarely close without deliberate institutional reforms. Countries that have achieved significant progress, such as Rwanda or several Nordic states, did so through structural measures including electoral quotas, constitutional provisions, and party-level reforms. Gender equality in politics rarely occurs organically; it is usually the result of deliberate policy choices.
Nigeria has not been entirely passive in confronting this challenge. The adoption of the National Gender Policy in 2006 established a target of 35 percent affirmative action for women in appointive and elective positions. While this policy signaled an important commitment, it lacked binding legal force and has therefore produced uneven implementation.
More recently, reform advocates have advanced proposals aimed at addressing structural barriers directly. Among the most significant is the Special Seats for Women Bill, introduced as part of ongoing constitutional reform debates. The proposal seeks to create additional legislative seats reserved specifically for women in the National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly. Its proponents argue that such measures are necessary to correct longstanding structural disadvantages that limit women’s ability to compete within Nigeria’s existing political system.
These debates reflect a growing recognition that incremental approaches have not been sufficient to correct Nigeria’s gender representation deficit.
Yet Nigeria’s current struggle over representation is not new. The demand for women’s participation in governance has deep historical roots. One of the earliest and most dramatic examples was the Aba Women’s Riot of 1929, when thousands of women mobilised across southeastern Nigeria to protest colonial taxation policies and their exclusion from administrative decision-making. The movement demonstrated women’s capacity to organise large-scale political action and challenge structures of authority.
A generation later, the activism of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti expanded the struggle further. Through the Abeokuta Women’s Union, she mobilised thousands of women to challenge unfair taxation and demand representation in local governance. Her work helped redefine debates about citizenship and political participation in colonial Nigeria.
These historical examples reveal a consistent pattern: women’s political participation in Nigeria has never been granted easily. It has been achieved through advocacy, organisation, and sustained civic pressure.
This reality remains evident today, particularly in local governance contexts. The recent Women in Host Communities Forum convened in Bayelsa State by Spaces for Change | S4C to commemorate International Women’s Day under the theme “Balance the Scales” offered a revealing illustration.
The forum brought together women from extractive host communities to discuss leadership, participation, and the barriers that continue to limit their role in decision-making structures. These communities, often directly affected by the economic and environmental consequences of resource extraction, are governed by complex networks of local institutions where women are frequently under and poorly represented.
What emerged from the discussions was striking: the women present were not asking whether they were capable of leadership. They were asking why they continue to be excluded from the spaces where decisions affecting their communities are made.
Their experiences reflect a broader institutional challenge. Leadership readiness among women is growing across Nigerian society, from professional sectors to grassroots civic organisations. Yet the systems that allocate political authority continue to operate through networks and practices that historically favoured male participation.
Reforms such as the Special Seats proposal, stronger enforcement of affirmative action commitments, and internal reforms within political parties could significantly alter this landscape. But these changes require political will.
As Nigeria marks International Women’s Day (and month) in 2026, the central question is no longer whether women are capable of leadership. That question has been answered repeatedly by history, experience, and evidence.
The real question is whether Nigeria’s political institutions are prepared to evolve. Until they do, the central paradox of gender representation will remain intact. Women are ready. Men are afraid, as echoed in Space for Change’s Women in Host Communities Forum this year.
And the future of Nigeria’s democracy may well depend on which of those realities ultimately prevails.
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John Onyeukwu, is a lawyer and public policy analyst with interdisciplinary expertise in law, governance, and institutional reform. He holds an LL.B (Hons) from Obafemi Awolowo University, an LL.M from the University of Lagos, and dual master’s degrees in Public Policy from the University of York and Central European University. He also earned a Mini-MBA. John has managed development projects on governance, public finance, civic engagement, and service delivery. He can be reached on john@apexlegal.com.ng
