By Victoria Ojeme

The governorship contest of the former Nigerian Minister of Women Affairs, late Aisha Al-Hassan, popularly called Mama Taraba was perhaps the closest Taraba state has gone in women political emancipation in recent times.

Recent political events have shown that some women who contested for key political positions were either refused to be voted for by the men or seen as weaker folks for governance. In fact, some groups of politicians, especially the men, have several times rejected calls for a gender equality bill and calling it a means for women empowerment.

Across the board, studies have shown that electorates see religious and cultural beliefs to be more superior to Nigeria’s constitution thereby discouraging women and creating a low level representation of women in government when compared to men.

Although formal representation is enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution, women remain underrepresented in elective offices and political leadership positions for more twenty years since the return of democracy in 1999. Not only are women relatively invisible in the political landscape, but there remains an intractable notion among Nigerians, including women themselves, that politics is male territory, and women who venture into it are ‘outliers’.

For example, since 1999, Mrs Rashida Abdullahi is the only woman who has ever been elected into the Taraba state house of assembly. She was elected in 2007 to represent Gashaka state constituency.

Even when party nomination forms are free, women hardly win political party primaries. Speaking on this, the Taraba state Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chairman, Kefas Agbu, said that the absence of female representatives in the legislature is due to women’s low participation in active politics of the state and their non-acceptability to voters. “As far as our party the PDP is concerned, the nomination form is free for women. All they need to do is just to pay administrative fees. Women are great mobilisers, they should encourage their fellow women; we want to see them coming out in their large numbers to contest.”

In next year’s general elections, Veronica Hassan, Beli 1 state constituency is the only woman who won a party’s primaries for the Taraba state House of Assembly seat.

The Commissioner for Women Affairs Taraba state, Hon. Bridget K. Twar, assured that she is “personally mobilizing women to vote for her so that she will get there for us.”

She was speaking at an event for the Nigeria For Women Project (NFWP)- an initiative of the federal government with the support of the World Bank designed to empower rural women, through building social capital, livelihood programmes, innovation and partnership, project monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Already, more than 19,000 women in three Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Taraba state have benefited from the programme.

“We are doing our best, as so many other programmes we have done for the women so far. Like they just ended this cash transfer to rural women to improve their lives, N20,000 was paid to about 3,000 women, we’ve just finished here in my office. And before then women are always taking care of both financially and otherwise.

“The administration is doing well in terms of taking care of women and we believe that our women are solidly behind the PDP government and we are ready to vote for PDP come 2023.

“We are up to three female commissioners now. It was normally one, it has not even reached two but this administration gave two women and we’ve just sworn in another woman making us three out of 25 commissioners. At least we are getting somewhere. And in all our local governments, the secretaries are women, the 16 local governments and we have a woman who is a vice chairman, we have a woman also who is head of service and so many others I cannot remember now,” Twar said.

On the World Bank funded Nigeria For Women Project she said “Taraba state is so excited about this programme because of the impact in the lives of the families, not only women, the entire family because you know once a woman is involved, a woman’s money is for the whole family, it is the man’s money that is for himself.

“So this project has impacted seriously since it deals with women, it has impacted so much on the family and the government is excited, that is why the governor requested that it should be extended or scaled up to other local governments because of the impact.”

Twar said that although the project has been piloted in Bali, Zing and Tabum local government areas out of the 16 local government areas of the state, they hope to extend it to the remaining areas in the coming days.

“Now we are planning to extend it to all the local governments, we have 16 local governments in the state, so we want to scale up the remaining 13 local governments but for now it is being carried out in 3 local governments.

“The World Bank has given us conditions in which we have met almost all of them, in fact let me say all of them because the governor has approved that we should source funds and pay for our counterpart funding and that is in progress now. We have many conditions they gave, by the grace of God, tomorrow or next, I will be going to Abuja to submit our proof of the conditions met and our letter of interest, indicating our interest to scale up.

“The counterpart fund is N450 Million and so far we have 85,000 women and 3,600 affinity groups, with the first counterpart funding of N200 Million that was paid; so with this N450 Million I believe it will go a very long way,” the Commissioner explained.

In an interview, the Chairman, Zing local government, Andrew Luka Zanya, said the NFWP came at the right time, adding: “Before then our women were experiencing poverty, I can refer to it as abject poverty.

“Most of them when they wake up in the morning they don’t know where to go, what they will eat for the day. Some of them keep on borrowing from individuals and after a time this becomes a big burden because they don’t have any means of paying back.”

He said “NFWP has alleviated the suffering of our women, it has enabled most of them to learn how to save through the WAGs loans scheme, they can now operate a business or they can now borrow loans internally within the repayments system.

“So, it has helped in improving the overall standard of living of our women, including their husbands because that effect is moving on to the whole family.

“What the government could not do, the project has done. It has gone a long way in paving the way for true national development, because there can never be true national development without developing the man.

“Subsequently, these women are going to transfer the knowledge and skills they have acquired to the rest of the society. They can now engage in many projects, save money on this project and invest.”

As an implementation strategy, the project helps beneficiaries organise themselves into Women Affinity Groups (WAGs) in wards in the implementing LGAs. One of the beneficiaries, Hanatu Benjamin, said the women in the six WAGs in Sarkin Dawa, had benefitted immensely hence the decision to use their savings for the renovation of the community dispensary which has been out of use since 2003.

“It cost us N180,000 and took us three weeks to renovate the dispensary. We painted the two-room facility, bought materials for five beds, and other things needed,” she explained.