A women-based Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), under the aegis of Womanifesto, has said that presidential candidates contesting in the 2023 elections must reveal their plans for women to earn their support.
Womanifesto said plans have been concluded to meet all presidential candidates on Tuesday, October 25, 2022, to table home their demands.
The women spoke at the National Women’s Dialogue with the theme “Electoral Integrity and Accountability: Towards Corruption – Free Elections” on Monday in Abuja.
The event was funded and supported by MacArthur Foundation and Women’s Rights Advancement & Protection Alternative (WRAPA Nigeria) in partnership with the Affirmative Action Initiative for Women.
Co-Convener, Womanifesto Dialogue, Dr Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi, while speaking, said it was high time the political class top treating women as second-class citizens in the country, adding that “our identity and dignity as women matters.”
She added that among issues of top priority to women is the declaration of a state of emergency on violence against women and girls.
Others according to her include increased women’s political participation, empowerment, sexual and reproductive health rights for women, constitutional reform to stop the marginalisation of women and security.
Afolabi said: “We are asking for five concrete issues that the government should attend to. For example, on ending violence against women, we noticed that about 31 out of the 36 states have been able to pass the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) VAPP, law, which was one of the things we put as a demand.
“But today, looking at the 2023 election, we are really alarmed with the extent of corruption that is going on, especially what happened during the primaries.
“We realised that the judiciary also has not been supportive of women. Imagine women were been asked by lawyers to bring N250 million to support their candidacy. The Ebonyi case is also there where the governor who had contested for the presidential primaries came back to hijack the senatorial ticket from a woman and we also have a case of a woman in Rivers state who had won the governorship ticket but lost the election and lost the case which went to the tribunal.
“We believe it is time for us to discuss what is happening between the lawyers and judges. We want the 2023 elections to be corruption free. Therefore, this is a campaign that people should vote for women during the election.
“We don’t want to be second-class citizens in the country. Our identity matters, and our dignity as women matters. By tomorrow, we will meet the presidential candidates taking questions from them but from what we are seeing now, we haven’t seen anyone of them speaking for women.”
The executive director, the International Society for Media in Public Health, Mrs Moji Makanjuola, lamented that despite attempts by past administrations to reach affirmative actions for women, women’s inclusion has dropped from 35 per cent to less than 10 per cent across the nation.
She said aside from women being marginalised during political parties primaries, the campaign councils recently constituted by parties were short of fairness.
She said: “If we have lost out on elective positions, we can still demand appointed positions and we need to start speaking to it until we get it right. You cannot leave almost 50 per cent of the population behind and think that they have nothing to contribute to nation-building”.
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