Women and Political Participation in the Nigerian Fourth Republic, 2019-2023

Women participation in Nigerian politics has been a major concern as a result of limited number of women in both elective and appointive political positions. There have been efforts by government, non-governmental organizations, and different women movements to improve women political participation. Such efforts include the National Gender Policy (NGP), which recommends 35% affirmative action, seeking for a more inclusive representation of women in public service positions. This is in line with the Beijing Declaration during the Fourth World Conference on women which advocated 30% affirmative action for women in politics. Despite these efforts, there is still a very low percentage of women representation in politics in Nigeria. The national average of women’s political participation in Nigeria is as low as 6.7 percent in elective and appointive positions, which is far below the global average of 22.5 percent, Africa regional average of 23.4 percent and West African sub-regional average of 15 percent. While many factors, including the patriarchy nature and politics, Nigeria has been blamed for the low women political participation, there has been a dearth of study on how the political party system could be a major factor militating against women political participation in the country. Thus, to fill the identified gap in literature, the study examined how the political party system in Nigeria served as a constraint to women political participation. The study is a qualitative research. Liberal feminist theory is adopted for to the study. The findings showed that most of the women in political positions were facing challenges associated with the female gender, including intimidation, harassment and biases.