BENIN CITY— HUNDREDS of women yesterday, in Benin City, Edo State under the aegis of National Council of Women’s Societies, Nigeria, Edo State chapter, threatened to boycott the coming elections because most of the political parties were not complying with the 35 percent affirmative action as proposed by the United Nations charter.
The women group staged a street walk in Benin City to press home their demands, saying that they were no longer ready to play second fiddle. The women at the state secretariat of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ, in Benin City where the president of the group, Mrs. Omoluru Eniye, spoke noted “We are taking a stand either to boycott the election or to ask the women not to vote because we have the numbers.
We have been cheated for a long time and we do not want it to happen again. “We can call the bluff and ask women not to vote and let us see how they will win. “We have come to tell the world, that the women of Edo State, have been marginalized. We are majority when it comes to voting but when it comes to elective positions, they keep the women aside. They want to give us appointive positions so that they can keep the women aside. “They want to give us appointive positions so that when we say something that is not too comfortable with government, they fire us.
For some time now, we have been watching the political scene in Edo State, they have been doing adoption and all the people that they have been adopting are men. “There is no single woman that has been adopted and we fear that if we allow this to continue, especially as their primaries are drawing near, women are going to be schemed out.
“We watched President Muhammadu Buhari when he was making his speech in UN Assembly, he drummed support for the inclusion of women in politics in Nigeria but unfortunately, in Nigeria, women are relegated to the back ground and we are saying no. “You can imagine for 12 years in Edo State, only one woman has been in the state House Assembly and when they want to take critical decisions, what has she to say?
