The lead-up to Nigeria’s 2023 general elections could have been less dramatic if the All Progressive Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, simply insisted that he could not remember the religion of his running mate, Senator Kashim Shettima, just as he insisted he could not recollect the primary and secondary schools he attended when he filled his 2003 INEC governorship form and 2023 INEC presidential form.
Unfortunately, many people all over the country are persecuting Mr Tinubu for opting for a “Muslim-Muslim ticket” just because he fessed up for once that he remembered his classmates, no, his running mates and their religion, and stands by his recollections.
Yet, there is something about Mr Tinubu’s choice of a VP that shifts the people’s attention from an unarguable injustice among all the major political parties – the exclusion of females as presidents or vice presidents in 2023.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, “The subindex where Nigeria has the widest gap to close is Political Empowerment, which has been widening since 2012 and currently stands at 96%.”
This means Nigeria maintains a 96% disparity or 4% equality between women and men in political positions at the beginning of 2022. This means the female: male ratio is 4:100 or 1:25.
Up till now, no one has asked why Tinubu did not choose a Muslim female from the North as his Vice President, why Abubakar Atiku did not choose a female Christian from the south, or why Peter Obi did not choose a female Muslim from the North for the same role, or why a female Muslim-Christian presidential candidate did not emerge in any of the three prominent parties, APC, PDP and LP.
Besides the elected Executive positions, Nigeria had 29 female House of Assembly members to 440 Males – less than 7 women representing the female population which is about half of the population, while 100 men represent the other half population which is male.
In discussions on inclusion as a developmental goal towards 2023 (together with other forms of inclusion), is anyone talking about the inclusion of females, who are approximate half (49.3%) of the 206.14 million population as of 2020, for elective and appointive positions, especially when Muslim-Christian males have shown incremental cluelessness in the past decade and an incorrigible calling to ground the country in deaths and debts, and when science is providing new evidence that females are more suited to solve a problem like Nigeria?
Male-Male Ticket: The Price of Male Dominance
The audacity of a male-male ticket, in Tinubu-Shettima, Atiku-Okowa, Obi-Datti, and many other 2023 presidential teams, against the people’s loud silence at such a costly exclusion of women from leadership in the next dispensation, reveal that Nigeria is not ready to tap into the salvific strengths of conscientous female leadership.
A recent study cited in the Harvard Business Review showed that women leaders in government and corporate organisations outperformed their male counterparts on most leadership competencies during the Coronavirus pandemic:
“According to an analysis of 360-degree assessments conducted between March and June of this year, women were rated by those who work with them as more effective. The gap between men and women in the pandemic is even larger than previously measured, possibly indicating that women tend to perform better in a crisis. In fact, women were rated more positively on 13 of the 19 competencies that comprise overall leadership effectiveness in the authors’ assessment.”