THISDAYonline

Last week Tuesday, a number of people gathered at the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Lagos, the German foundation concerned with "the advancement of democratic political participation", especially of disadvantaged groups like women. The meeting was to review the experiences of women politicians in the just concluded political party primaries in the country with a view to exploring what challenges and opportunities were there, what worked, for the successful, and what didn't work, for the not so successful, and the whys.

The group was made up mainly of female politicians, gender activists and a handful of men. Only three female aspirants were on hand to share their experiences. Mrs. Bissy Koya, former Lagos State House of Assembly aspirant in the Alliance for Democracy (AD); Mrs Teju Abiola, the National Conscience Party's (NCP) deputy governorship candidate for Lagos state; and Nkoyo Toyo, a gender activist who aspired to the House of Representatives from Cross Rivers State on the platform of the People's Democratic Party (PDP).

Of the troika, only Teju Abiola of the NCP was successful, having contested with and defeated male contestants in the race. Koya, a lawyer, said she lost her bid because "party elders" more or less forced her to step down for a male candidate, whom she believed was less popular than her in the constituency. She had come out of this experience with two lessons. One, that individual candidate's agenda was secondary to party loyalty and interest. Two, that one must have sufficient money to settle political IOUs and buy the trust and support of both the party and her followers. She didn't quite frame all this in gender terms, and if she felt she was pushed out because she was a woman this could only be inferred from her declaration that 'as a woman' she could not play some games that the men were playing.

Nkoyo offered a more robust appreciation of the obstacles that stopped her. Her party, the PDP, she said is "structured for exclusion." And this, she said applies to both the male and the female party members alike. Lack of information, or what she called "monetisation of information"; high patronage system; complex hierarchy of power; constantly changing goal post, are among the mechanisms of exclusion in the party. She offered however that generally, political parties in the country still lack the gender perspective in their policies of inclusion. She said both structural and social expectations are heavily skewed against women, and "for every woman, there are both the party and the personal challenges to contend with, especially concerning expectations not only by the male designed and dominated structures but also by fellow women." Like Mrs. Koya, she said every woman politician is constantly haunted by the question of how far she was willing to go, or 'play the ball.' On paper, the PDP has good policies for encouraging women participation, which she says does not play out in practice. For example, women were excepted from paying the nomination fees, but even this turned out to be much of liability "others who were spending money felt you were advantaged and since you didn't spend as much money it means you have less to lose and therefore, you were more easily expendable." She also noted that the PDP 30 percent policy for women was not met. This was borne out by the fact that in the entire recently concluded primaries to select the party's governorship candidates for the presidency, the governorship, the senatorial, the house representatives and the house of assembly elections, women only won 65 slots. These include 3 deputy governorship candidates for Lagos, Osun and Ogun; 5 senatorial; 23 house of representatives; and 34 house of assemblies. The PDP National Women Leader, Mrs. Josephine Anenih has been full of praises for the party, for what she called an "unprecedented dividends." While the women leader must have sufficient reasons to celebrate, even this "unprecedented" achievements could only serve to put in sharper relief what has been achieved of what is possible and even desirable. While the issue of numerical representation is significant, other issues around the quality of representation for women generally within the party and the governance structure must also surge forward. And even though the journey towards gender parity is still far away, no doubt, present achievements must constantly be reviewed against this ultimate goal.

For Teju Abiola, the story is different however. She had to compete under equal terms with men and she won. According to her, no party elder asked her to step down and no money was requested from her either to buy forms or for any other thing. Her position was supported by her principal, the governorship candidate of the National Conscience Party in Lagos State who said women represented 25 per cent of all the successful candidates in the party, and these represented 70 per cent of all the women that contested on the platform of the party. The NCP, he said, is an "equal opportunity" party that sets no barriers or privileges anyone on account of sex. This however has its own implication that would be highlighted later.

Left out or bolted on

The fundamental argument for women political participation or gender parity in political and public life touches almost on morality. This is to the effect that the representative group of any society or community should reflect as much as possible the diversity of that society or community. Statistics are almost as difficult as prepositions in Nigeria, but if available records are anything to go by, then women definitely constitute the majority of Nigerian population. The simple democratic logic is that women should be the majority in governance. But that is logic and not politics. As disadvantaged groups, women have to always fight male patriarchal hegemony in almost all facets of public life. And most of the time, when the male constructed and dominated structures say they are making the space for women, it is always difficult not to make it sound like magnanimity. And that is why women always have to take whatever comes with gratitude. However, at the heart of all this is power which, fortunately, gender literature is almost exclusively devoted to. And it is from this discursive framework that the party policies on women inclusion have to be assessed.

Certainly, no political party will come out to declare that it was not willing to let women in, and mouthing women empowerment has even become a fad or an indicator of progressive leaning. Whether a well articulated ideological position exists within the parties for encouraging women inclusion and moving towards parity is another thing. And this is not a Nigerian problem. It is problem everywhere, China, Norway, and Whales are few examples of places where efforts have been made to confront the issue of women political participation frontally with varying levels of success. And what is perhaps, more interesting is that striking familiarity in all the arguments canvassed to keep women out or simply bolt them on, as they case may be.

What is at the heart of the matter however is always how men think about women and how women think about themselves in relations to public and political power. This can go far off as to touch on how women are framed and constructed both as biological and social beings, including their productive and reproductive roles, the patriarchal notion of how physically "weak" and "vulnerable" women are and even how qualitatively low they are in terms of merit.

As Jude Howell reported, perhaps, the Chinese phrase "suzhi di" best captures all the semantic contours of the "low quality" argument. According to her, "it refers not only to women's verifiable lower performance in terms of education, culture and literacy, but also to women's own psychological internalisation of inferiority, resulting in low esteem and low self-confidence. It also resonates closely with related notions of women's physical weakness, emotionality, vulnerability, reinforcing the idea that women need special protection..."

Affirmative action or Positive Action

The issue of affirmative action was again well debated at the Lagos meeting last week. While all the female participants were one behind affirmative action, a few male participants felt it could even be counter-productive to the course of women participation.

One of the arguments is that affirmative action that reserves certain percentage for women, while intended as minimum could be easily converted to maximum and therefore constitute a new glass ceiling for women. "If you say 30 per cent, people could say, okay 30 per cent and nothing more," one male participant observed. It is therefore better to leave it open and focus instead on merit. This argument makes a lot of sense, it is however not clear by "leaving it open," the participant also means going gender blind as this constitutes potentially even more danger to women participation than whatever possible dysfunction could come with the affirmative action. Like one commentator rightly noted, "a gender-neutral ban on discriminatory practices would allow only equal treatment of unequals and preclude exactly those measures that might be effective in improving the situation of women."

Especially within the political parties, while the system might not erect any physical or institutional blockade to participation, women may still find it difficult to participate, not because they don't want to, but because they don't have the capacity or the power to do so. This was made sufficiently clear in the submissions of the two female aspirants that lost. Like Armatya Sen argued, "the functioning of each individual (i.e. the activities that one may undertake) depends on the set of actual capabilities with which one is endowed by a broad constellation of social factors." In other words, as another writer explained, "if in any given case, certain actions (for instance, because of deprivation of necessary resources) are not within the set of the actor's capabilities, the freedom to act in that way would be spuriously attributed to such an actor."

Therefore, even parties was willing to offer the institutional space, as the case of the PDP has demonstrated, one must still examine other critical and non-systemic factors that may aid or retard participation of women. Access to resources is one of factor. And these touches on the larger social arrangements there are and how this empower or disempower women. This factor is even more likely to be crucial in the years ahead. How the expansion of the market economy in Nigeria will affect the entire question of women empowerment is one major challenge that gender experts will have to really focus on. As the government steps back and allow the market to take over, all the support systems that could be backed by state policies would definitely be withdrawn. And when the market is trusted with social arrangements and resource allocation, it becomes a question of the fittest surviving. This urgently brings us back to the question of entry-point advantage. Thus, like another writer surmised, in a market arrangement, "competition and choice becomes a new rationale for legitimising the dominant male presence in politics and government." The changing circumstances of market reforms therefore, will likely lock out more women from means of production and therefore, by extension deny them the necessary resources for political participation.

If women are less educated it is only natural that men will outnumber them in public life. The same if they have less access to resources. And if women have to also devote more time for domestic and family task, it is only natural that they will have less time for actively engaging in public political activities, the so-called "double-burden." This last part is one major area that perhaps it will take a lot more time for us to come to terms with in this part of the world. Despite the almost radical redefinition of the role of women as testified to by the increase in number of career women in recent years, for most women, the choice still always have to be between family life and public life. This dilemma is even likely to be more compounded by the recent explosion in religious practices with its pacificatory implications for women and its tendencies to frame women in terms of their reproductive roles and spousal commitments.

All these are problems that have to be tackled outside the formal political arrangements. But as it has been argued, "meaningful political participation requires a broader definition of politics," which must go beyond allocation of space to women. The Norwegian experience could come handy here. In the Scandinavian country, the state had to get more involved in the task of child rearing and giving parental incentives, essentially to free women for more public activities. This include, children centres, 50,000 of which was built in the five-year period between 1975 to 1980 as a means of facilitating women's access to labour markets. Norway could be far off, but it is a useful pointer to the kind of challenges that people interested in women participation must work towards.

Someone asked at the meeting last week why Nigeria that found it expedient to adopt such policies as quota system, Federal Character and such mechanisms of diversity governance, find it difficult to adopt affirmative action as a broad based policy. The link between Federal Character and affirmative action is quite interesting. But it means that "gender" has to be asserted as a distinct social and even political constituency that needs to be brought in. This has to be done through a more sophistication articulation of the issues around women participation. And it is not a job for political parties or a few interested women alone.

So, who speaks for women?

The task of articulating "gender" as an important identity categorisation in Nigeria is going to be a tough task. This is not for any less reason than the absence of a well-organised mass movement of women in the country. The voices that are often heard are either those of pseudo-feminists who don't even understand the basic rudiments of the issues around female inclusion beyond mouthing empty slogans, to a few articulate and intellectual feminists who throw the 'bras' on people's face and therefore end up scaring potential partners, alienating fellow females and end up achieving nothing. The so-called state-derived feminism serves only selfish interests and at best is only a fa�ade and totally lacking in quality and focus. What was witnessed under the military rule was a classic example when the discourse of feminism was hijacked by wives of strongmen who created all manners of 'poverty alleviation' scheme (Better Life for Women and Family Support Programme), which as commentators have rightly observed, were only designed to mobilise women for the legitimisation of military dictatorship in the country. Rather than scouting for agents of change, it appears that what is needed is first locating the process, and agencies that would address themselves to this process. The challenge is fabricating a true women movement.

The politics of "women wing"

Almost all parties used to have 'women brigade' or 'women wing.' How these peripheral groups are used to manipulate women and keep them out of mainstream politics has been well documented. Like one writer argued, by confining women's political participation to the so-called 'women wings', [the party] had erected a mechanism, not only for retarding the participation of women, but, in fact, for resisting the 'empowerment' of women towards independent and self-enlightened participation. "By remaining officially linked to older incorporated structures, such women's organisations were tied to the party's dictates and its overriding interest in securing as many women's votes as possible," she said. Many women activists have also argued that 'women wings' are the worst enemies of women participation in politics. What is however clear is that 'women wing' itself is not the problem but the use to which it is put. It is therefore possible to expand the possibilities offered by this structure and use it to organise from within. The kind of women movement envisaged could result, for example, from a partnership between the civil society and the 'women wing,' with the civil society elements articulating the 'strategic' needs for the women within the party and helping them to organise from within. Of course, there is an element of naivety here when one considers the reality of power relations between the main party apparatus and the women wing. But the women wing can still offer the of critical entry point that is required to drive the change process.

Who do the women represent anyway?

Do women in public offices represent women alone? Do they even represent women at all? This question was raised at the Lagos meeting last week. One male participant sought to know why he should support women candidates if their agenda is to go in and take care of women alone at the detriment of men. This question might sound uninformed, but it is a real fear that abound among many men who understand women empowerment to mean male disempowerment. To allay this kind of fear women politicians might need to frame their agenda in universal terms. However, can they do it and still be seen as women representing the female gender constituency? Moreso, is it possible at all to fashion a homogenous female gender constituency from Abia to Zamfara, and cutting across different social class, religious and tribal identity groupings in a complex society like Nigeria. It is the reality of female representation that even women who have been successful at the polls or in politics generally soon find themselves serving elite and class interest rather than serving the interest of women, which at the basic level, should aim at reconfiguring the power equation within the gender divides. Researchers have argued that evidence is hard to come by that women in power serve women interest. Because embedded within the concept of representation is also the reality of power. And even if it was possible to see 'gender, as a distinct homogenous constituency, it must be acknowledged that there must be different locations of power within this constituency that it would be foolhardy to assume that a woman in power represents women naturally. This therefore demands a more nuanced definition of the role of women in politics. One challenge in this respect therefore, seems to be the education of men on the one hand, at least to assure them that female empowerment does not necessarily translate into a zero-sum game, and on the hand to properly articulate a pro-women agenda for women in power to ensure that they end up serving ends that would even endanger women interest more.

No doubt some gains have been made. And as Nigeria's democracy itself matures, the fortunes of women in politics are even likely to get better in the years to come. This however, will not come on a platter of gold. This is all about power, is power ever conceded willingly?