By Tony Edike

ENUGU-WOMEN politicians in the South East geopolitical zone, including those contesting various elective offices in different political parties, have met in Enugu to seek ways of enhancing their chances in the April 2011 general elections.

The event organized by Women Aid Collective, WACOL, in collaboration with Democratic Governance for Development Project, DGD, also discussed the vices meted out on them during campaigns and ways of overcoming the ugly trend by ensuring that they voted massively for female candidates of the various parties in the elections.

Some of the vices militating against them, the women enumerated, include indigeneship contestations, zoning and power sharing formula, gender-based political violence against women, cultural and religious fundamentalism, family and societal biases against female politicians, use of pejorative name calling for female politicians and propaganda.

The women lamented that despite awareness on such issues, they had gone on unabated.

Executive Director of WACOL, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, regretted that despite the 2006 census figures in Nigeria which put the women as half the population, “women representation and participation in democratic transitions in the country remains dismal with less than 10 percent occupying elective position and less than 20 percent occupying appointive positions.”