Abstract:
A careful look at the socio-political landscape of Nigeria reveals a
challenging narrative: Nigerian women are, to a large extent, missing from the
political scene. The representation and participation of Nigerian women within
political decision-making spheres as well as in the electoral are disproportionately
limited. This is certainly a contradiction given the fact that significant advancements
have been made by Nigerian women in sectors such as education and
entrepreneurship in recent years. The blame for this state of affairs can be laid at the
door of certain religious, biological, cultural, and even cognitive dynamics. This
paper investigated the theoretical bandwidths of limited political participation for any
democratic demographic, women‘s political participation in the historical
background of Nigeria, the political decision-making process in Nigeria as well the
cultural and socio-religious causes of limitation for women to determine the extent of
the barriers to women‘s political participation and propose a blueprint for change.
Through documentary analysis and a few anonymous interviews, this paper
discovered that constitutional bias, gender-based violence and media bias, low
literacy rates, and electoral gender quotas were the chief barriers to women‘s
political participation in Nigeria. Finally, this paper found out that the vision of
enhanced political participation for Nigerian women can be realized if there could be
grassroots sensitization, constitutional reform, education, and empowerment for
women as well as a nationwide awareness campaign employing media sensitization
to support women in political parties.
