POLITICS

Women Affirmative Action on President Buhari's Cabinet!

                              Women today affirmative on President Buhari on his cabinet . Based on his campaign promises. Where he pledged support for them in all sectors of the economy;  he specifically vowed to implement the 2005 National Gender Policy  Which makes provision for women to occupy 35 percent appointive positions . After four months of waiting Buhari  releases nominees for ministerial positions, where many were optimistic that based on his campaign promises,  more women would be nominated for his administration in Federal Executive Council. This optimism was based on some of the promises he made to women groups during the presidential campaign of the All Progressives Congress (APC). During the campaign, Buhari had said that his party has a new deal for women and this accounted for the overwhelming support he gathered. In one of his numerous campaign promises, he was reported to have said: “We shall commit ourselves to merit based affirmative action’s to level the playing field for women and provide them with opportunities to be part of decision making and governance at all levels”,

What we have currently seen so far is unacceptable. It is disturbing that despite APC’s gender friendly stance, the President Ministerial list of 36 nominees has only six women. From this, five are from the North and one from the Southwest. Specifically, these are Aisha Alhassan from Taraba State, Kemi Adeosun from Ogun State, Amina Mohammed from Gombe State, Khadija Bukar Ibrahim from Yobe State, Zainab Ahmed from Kaduna State and Aisha Abubakar from Sokoto. These are the few women that would form part of President Buhari’s cabinet. The gender picture in former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration was by far better. If this is the product of a four-month long-drawn thinking, Nigerian Women Demonstrated They Have What It Takes To Perform Excellently In the Last Dispensation a lot of interest was shown when it comes to issues affecting Nigerian women. Women came out to vote and what we have seen so far outweighs our expectations.
The question now is why only six women in ministerial nominees? Has the president forgotten his promises so quickly?
It appears that women are being marginalised in the ongoing appointments. We really need to know what is going on, Nigerian women are looking, they are watching. The truth is that women are not expecting anything below expectation, considering what happened in the last few years, else they would not have turned out the way we did.
Everywhere in the world, women bring unique leadership skills to governance. This has been demonstrated in many developed and progressive countries and Nigeria should be seen as progressing and must ensure gender equality in all appointments in the country.
My expectation, therefore, is for the consideration of women for 35 per cent of federal, state and local government level appointments. This way, we can begin to witness acceptable representation, which is a prerequisite for balanced and responsible governance.