WE WILL NOT SUPPORT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES WITHOUT PLANS FOR FEMALES——-500WOMEN GROUP

As campaign for 2023 elections gather more momentum, Womanifesto – a coalition of women from about 500 Civil Society Organizations has declared that it will not support any presidential candidates without plans for gender mainstreaming in their manifesto.

The group noted that in addition to the marginalization of females in the political sphere and society, presidential candidates of all the parties are rolling out their campaigns without concerns and provisions for gender inclusion.

Speaking on monday in Abuja at the National Women’s Dialogue “Electoral Integrity and Accountability: Towards Corruption – Free Elections” Womanifesto said that it has planned a programme to meet and drill all the presidential candidates on Tuesday, October 25, 2022, on the rights and dignity of women.

Co-Convener of Womanifesto Dialogue, Dr Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi, said that the political class must stop marginalizing and treating women as second-class citizens in the country.

She said that the five concrete issues of top priority to women that government should attend to are the declaration of a state of emergency on violence against women and girls, constitutional reform to stop the marginalisation of women, increased women’s political participation, empowerment, sexual and reproductive health rights for women.

She stated that looking at the 2023 election, females are really alarmed about the extent of corruption that is going on, especially what happened during the primaries.

“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”.

Calling on the judiciary to be supportive of women, she maintained that the women advocacy is that people should vote for women during the election and also ensure that the election is corruption free.

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, gender inclusion has dropped from 35 per cent to less than 10 per cent across the country.

She said that aside from women being marginalised during political parties primaries, the campaign councils recently constituted by parties were short of fairness.

She noted that women have lost in elective positions but can start making demands for appointed positions because women are almost 50 per cent of the population which cannot be left behind in national development.