Unlike in 2015 when there was only one female presidential candidate, it appears that more women will be slugging it out with incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and candidates of other political parties in the 2019 presidential election. This is as a handful of women have declared their intention to vie for the country’s top job next year.
While women have yet to get a fair deal in the Nigerian political space, the presidency has remained a far-fetched dream. Until the emergence of Remi Sonaiya as the presidential flag-bearer of KOWA Party in 2015, Sarah Jibril, whose aspiration to the presidency dates back to 1992, was the only known female presidential aspirant in Nigeria since the country’s return to civil rule.
The equation however seems to be changing, as BDSUNDAY checks show that currently, there are up to four women seriously aspiring to the presidency. Of these, three are likely to get their parties’ nod to fly the presidential flag.
This is even as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, said in September last year, that it would support Nigerian female politicians vying for elective positions in the 2019 general elections.
The candidates
Elishama Rosemary Ideh
Elishama Ideh, who is pursuing her presidential ambition on the platform of the Alliance for a New Nigeria (ANN), is convinced she would get her party’s ticket.
For her, Nigeria at this time needs “a leader who combines integrity with intelligence and a deep and vast understanding of the implications of the 21st century global economy and Nigeria’s place in it”.
She promises to reform the country’s revenue generation and allocation structure, including federal tax regimes; reduce the cost and simplify the processes and procedures of doing business anywhere in Nigeria, so that local and foreign investors will thrive; work to ensure fair remuneration in terms of wages, welfare packages and retirement benefits within the limits of available means, among others.
“I am a firm believer in the values, vision and mission of this great party, and I’m committed to the actualisation of its ideology and its innovative roadmap for the regeneration of Nigeria and the creation of the material and social wealth that will secure the present welfare and future security of Nigerians living today and generations yet unborn,” she said while declaring her intention in Abuja.
Born and raised in Lagos, Ideh, who hails from Edo State, was educated at Mayflower Primary School Ikenne, Ogun State, Federal Government Girls’ College (FGGC), Onitsha, and Bowie State College, Maryland, USA, where she studied Mass Communication.
Remi Sonaiya
The 63-year-old retired professor of French Language and Applied Linguistics at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, was the only female candidate in the 2015 presidential election, where she finished 12th with 13,076 votes.
Confirming to BDSUNDAY her intention to join the 2019 presidential race in an interview, she said, “Yes, I am one of the aspirants on the platform of my party. I will run again.”
A firm believer in devolution of power, Sonaiya said at the 4thAnniversary Lecture of The Niche, a newspaper, in Lagos, that the role of the central government is to create an enabling environment that is propitious for prosperity, development and to manage the security of the state.
“The Federal Government has a role in managing interaction with the rest of the world. Leave the state to handle developments in their various states. I don’t believe that there is a one-size-fits-all for every state in the federation. Let each state determine what approach it will take to develop. Let every state exploit what they have on their land. For those who do not have mineral resources, they can create intellectual resources. The whole essence is to create wealth, bring money. The rest of us will contribute to the centre to run,” she said.
Even though she believes that parties like KOWA may not find it easy to square up with established ones, particularly the incumbent that deploys the resources that belong to everyone, to prosecute elections, she is not deterred. She believes with sufficient sensitisation of the voting populace, the desired change can be achieved.
“Well, definitely I will try and get my message across more to Nigerians. You know it was my first time in 2015. My first outing really opened my eyes to many things. This time I will be getting my message across and have more access to people.
“I am a little bit known now than was the case in 2015. I will have more support. I did not have wide reach, but it is different now. Again, this time around, I hope more money will be at my disposal to do some of the legitimate things that should be done. I am hopeful of a better outing his time around,” she said.
Born March 2, 1955 in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, Oluremi Comfort Sonaiya was educated at St. Luke’s Demonstration School, Ibadan, St. Anne’s School, Ibadan, University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), and Cornell University in the United States, where she bagged a PhD in Linguistics.
She started her career as assistant lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages, Obafemi Awolowo University, where she rose to become a professor in 2004.
Eunice Atuejide
This 39-year-old legal practitioner, businesswoman, management consultant, and entrepreneur is the founder and leader of the National Interest Party (NIP), a technology-driven political party which says it is “committed to fight, by all means necessary, the mismanagement of our national wealth, to recover as much of our stolen wealth as we can find, to eradicate the abysmal levels of corruption in our national life; the unequal treatment of our people at all levels”.
An online report on her says Atuejide “desires to form a government of passionate and patriotic Nigerians with undisputed integrity; leaders who are not moved by religious, ethnic, tribal, gender or any other differences; people who are ready to work together irrespective of their differences; people whose only collective purpose is to create a country which works for every Nigerian – born and unborn”.
The Enugu State-born mother of five says she believes firmly that a government of good leaders is the surest way out of Nigeria’s present quagmire.
Described as “a passionate Nigerian with unwavering faith in the country and people”, Atuejide has a background in Agricultural Economics, Business Administration, Law, French, German and Spanish languages, and film-making, among others.
Being the engine-room of NIP, Atuejide is most likely to be the party’s flag-bearer.
Olufumilayo Adesanya-Davies
A professor of Language and Communication Arts at the Rivers State University of Education, Olufumilayo Adesanya-Davies believes the solution to Nigeria’s current challenges is in the hands of women.
The 55-year-old professor and founder of Agape Bible Church, who bagged her degrees from the University of Ilorin, University of Port Harcourt, and Northwestern University, says she is still keeping the party under which she would run “under close wraps”.
“We don’t have a platform yet. We are just saying that officially, this is a presidential aspirant for 2019 and later we will take it to the next level,” she said. “As time goes on and as we are taking counsel from the youths, the family, mothers and the children, we will declare on which platform the next first female president will be coming from.”
Adesanya-Davies, who hails from Ira, Kwara State, says she began to nurse the ambition to contest the presidential election in 2015, though her interest in the race was boosted by the decision of political parties to make nomination forms free for women aspirants.
She says she has so far consulted with Sarah Jibril, who is also from Kwara State, as well as Patience Jonathan, wife of former President Goodluck Jonathan. Both ladies have endorsed her aspiration, she says.
Roadblocks ahead
But while the number of female presidential aspirants may have increased, and even though the League of Women Voters in Nigeria (LWVN) in May demanded, among other things, that all political parties in the country leave open the office of the vice president for women, field female governorship aspirants in at least 12 states, and ensure that all male governorship candidates have women as running mates, some observers say Nigeria’s political landscape is littered with mines that would always stop women from making headway, especially in the presidential race.
Ahead of the 2015 elections, for instance, the 100 Women Group, a club of some of Nigeria’s foremost female activists, issued a statement on women political participation decrying the rate at which women were being excluded from political participation.
The group, in the statement issued in December 2014, observed that most of the women were cajoled out of their aspirations, alleging that this amounted to emotional violence against women during the party primaries. The group said the instruments deployed to achieve this emotional violence included high financial intimidation with money being spent to influence the various delegates.
Remi Sonaiya, a professor and presidential candidate of KOWA Party (KP) in the 2015 election, agrees, saying increasing monetisation of the political system and violence associated with elections in the country have discouraged women involvement in politics in recent times.
“How many women are aspiring for elective positions in the country, or showing interest? They complain of violence, so they are afraid of the process. You know women; a lot of us could easily be intimidated. But what is happening now is discouraging a lot of women from coming out to compete; we need to change the system,” Sonaiya said.
“Another challenge is money. Women may not have enough cash to offer bribe to the politicians, or buy nomination forms. Of course, I agree you do need some amount of money for travels and to print posters and some other things, but the current situation is not helping us,” she said.
Sonaiya said she was not really in support of a quota for women, adding that, perhaps, “we need some form of legislation to encourage women, but that may give space to all sorts of people; it is not the best”.
Ebere Ifendu, chairperson, Women in Politics Forum in Nigeria (WIP), said the difficult Nigerian political terrain remains a discouraging factor for women.
Apart from political violence, Ifendu said monetisation of the political process was another big problem.
“Women don’t have resources to match men, and don’t have the strength to be as violent as the men. There is no genuine internal democracy in the political parties and candidates are handpicked. Because there is no internal democracy in political parties, women are not able to come out as candidates,” she said. “Secondly, because of the tokenism of the free forms that the political parties give women, when it comes to consensus, it is the woman that is often asked to step down. They will rather consider someone who paid for forms, and so they will scheme us out again. It is like giving you something with the right hand and taking it back with the left hand,” she said.
She called for more internal democracy, independent candidacy, as well as legislation for Affirmative Action to encourage women with quality and capacity to run for elective positions.
Tolani Animashaun, a former aspirant to the position of national deputy woman leader of the PDP, said the current political system was not encouraging women and that the progress achieved in previous administrations was because there were deliberate efforts by those administrations to put women and their issues in the front-burner.
“We would continue to see fewer women even in 2019 elections. What is happening is that women are not put in front in this APC/Buhari-led administration like in the previous governments of Obasanjo and Jonathan. We are now in the minority,” Animashaun said.
“Presently, out of 109 senators, we have eight women senators, and out of 360 members of the House of Representatives, we have about 14 women. We had far more numbers between 1999 and 2017,” she said.
Earlier in March, the Women Arise for Change Initiative (WA), a non-governmental organisation led by Joe Okei-Odumakin, renowned rights activist, reportedly called on government at all levels to establish a Women’s Trust Fund to support female politicians bidding for elective positions in the country, provide enabling leadership skill development for women aspirants, as well as organise community support for women in politics.
