I came across Ike Willie-Nwobu’s fascinating and thought-provoking intervention with the above title, and it stayed with me long after I finished reading.
Willie-Nwobu made a case for greater inclusion of women in governance and public office as the country drifts towards the 2027 elections, he observed, among other things, that “while there is some unanimity that Nigerian women have been scandalously shortchanged in Nigerian politics, there has never been any real commitment to improving political participation and representation for women.” It is a sharp, painful verdict, and it deserves interrogation beyond applause.
The first irony that struck me is that this indictment was written by a man, not a woman. That fact alone unsettles a lazy orthodoxy. It vindicates the suspicion that men will sometimes side with women even more fiercely than women side with themselves. It also reinforces one of the quiet engines that has sustained patriarchy, which Sylvia Walby described not merely as men’s domination over women but as a system of social structures that women themselves learn to navigate, negotiate and sometimes reproduce.
For many women, the calculation, conscious or unconscious, is that their interests might be better protected under a man than under a fellow woman. To see a man standing up for women when only a handful of politically interested women pursue the collective struggle with similar intensity is instructive, and it complicates the single story that male dominance is always an intentional male conspiracy.
I have acknowledged elsewhere how many universities, including the University of Jos, have never produced a female vice chancellor after decades of existence, leaving only a few women like Professor Patricia Lar Manko to rob shoulders with men and steal the show, evoking both admiration and anxious expectation.
As a country, we have not produced a female president, vice president, Senate president, or Secretary to the Government of the Federation. We did, however, produce a Speaker of the House of Representatives in Patricia Etteh in 2007, and her brief, turbulent tenure still hangs like a cautionary portrait in our political gallery. The fact that she remains the only one speaks louder than any policy document.
The first dilemma, therefore, is internal. Research on intrasexual competition and the much-debated Queen Bee syndrome first described by psychologists Staines, Tavris and Jayaratne suggests that in highly patriarchal hierarchies where opportunities for women are scarce, some women who break through may distance themselves from other women in order to survive, a tendency amplified when the structure itself rewards tokenism. Women are socialized to compete for limited recognition, and that supremacy battle often makes the benevolent gaze of a man feel safer than the scrutiny of a fellow woman.
It is an uncomfortable truth that if you have watched how a fellow woman can put another woman in her place, you will understand why that kind of policing is rarely attempted by a man in the same setting. It is not that women are naturally rivals in some biological sense, but that a scarcity economy of power makes rivalry rational.
This is made more visible by the way men have created a parallel empire of de facto positions for women that offer enormous visibility without constitutional standing. These spousal and associational offices have no provision in the 1999 Constitution, no salary and no formal budget line, yet they run structured organizations with executives, offices and programmes that often rival ministries in public presence.
At the national level there is the First Lady of Nigeria, who operates from the Villa with pet projects that can shape national conversation, and the wife of the Vice President, cast as Second Lady with similar outreach. At state level, every governor’s wife becomes a state First Lady, replicated by wives of deputy governors and speakers.
At the local level, the wife of a local government chairman becomes a local First Lady, while in the legislature and judiciary, wives of the Senate President, Speaker and Chief Justice command their own courts of influence, just as deans of ambassadors’ wives do in foreign affairs.
The most institutionalized of these is the security establishment, where a man’s appointment automatically makes his wife president of the wives association. The wife of the Inspector General heads the Police Officers’ Wives Association, the wife of the Chief of Army Staff heads the Nigerian Army Officers’ Wives Association, and the same pattern reproduces itself in the Navy, Air Force, Customs, Immigration, Correctional Service and NDLEA. These associations run schools, hospitals, markets and empowerment schemes inside barracks and formations. The wife of a Divisional Police Officer becomes POWA chair in that division, the wife of a Brigade Commander becomes NAOWA chair in that brigade.
Their origin lies in military history, with NAOWA created in the 1960s to manage barracks welfare when officers were away at war, but their persistence owes much to political patronage and to a social expectation that the wife of a leader must do charity. Not long ago, the wife of Senate President Godswill Akpabio was in the news for visiting the National Assembly on a weekend when the chamber was on recess to inspect projects in her capacity as wife of the number three citizen, a scene that perfectly captures both the visibility and the ambiguity of these roles.
Another issue that quietly impairs women’s political ascent is accessibility, the mundane but decisive currency of Nigerian politics. A political office here breeds bees that come for honey in large numbers, and an appointment is rarely seen as benefiting an individual alone but as carrying a multiplier effect for community, youth and kin. The culture rewards the man who can be called at midnight, who can hold a night meeting in his living room, whose door never closes.
Most women, constrained by domestic expectations, safety concerns and moral double standards, find it difficult to offer that kind of boundless accessibility. The feminist political scientist Anne Phillips reminds us in her work on the politics of presence that representation is not just about ideas but about physical presence in spaces where decisions are made at inconvenient hours. If the meeting where the list is drawn happens at 11 pm in a hotel, presence itself becomes a filter.
Related to this is the economy of generosity that defines our politics. Nigerian political loyalty is often monetized through largesse, a constant flow of cash, favours and bailouts that men dispense with performative ease. Without resorting to stereotype, research in behavioural economics consistently shows gendered differences in risk and spending under scarcity, and in many households a woman who spends money with the same casualness as a male politician would face a domestic inquisition. This does not define all women, but it points to a structural disparity. When politics is priced as philanthropy, prudence becomes a liability.
In essence, while I acknowledge that cultural and religious beliefs contribute to the marginalization of women and must be dismantled, I do not accept the exaggeration that describes the situation as simply scandalous and lays the blame solely at the feet of men, especially when the most passionate advocate for change in this instance is a man himself.
Women are not entirely disadvantaged by the current arrangement, for they exercise considerable control through what I have elsewhere called family power network as the sixth estate, an informal but potent soft power that is devoid of accountability yet deeply influential.
We can do better than we are doing, but doing better will require women to confront not only patriarchy outside but also the rivalries, calculations and comforts within, and for the polity to move from unofficial thrones for wives to official opportunities for women themselves.
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media. It offers evidence-based analysis and real-life insights as a credible alternative to groupthink, convenient narratives, and echo chambers. The platform explores a wide range of issues, including politics, society, relationships, governance, and contemporary trends.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
