In 1996, Nigeria was not exactly the place one would expect a journalist to publish a book asking whether its political system treated women equally.
General Sani Abacha was in power.
The democratic transition under General Ibrahim Babangida had collapsed.
The presidential election of 12 June 1993 had been annulled.
Political opponents were being arrested, driven into exile or pushed to the margins of public life.
Newspapers operated under pressure.
The country’s promised return to civilian government had become increasingly uncertain.
Yet, in the middle of all this, a Nigerian journalist published a book about women and political power.
Its title was Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics.
Its author was Nkechi Nwankwo.
Published in Lagos by Deutchetz Publishers in 1996, the 168 page book examined women, political participation, representation and the mass media.
At first glance, it might appear to be simply another book about women in politics.
But its timing tells a more interesting story.
Nwankwo was writing about political equality at precisely the moment when Nigeria was struggling to define what political freedom itself meant.
And she was not merely asking why there were so few women in government.
She was asking something much more uncomfortable:
If women could participate in Nigerian political life, why did so little of that participation become actual political power?
That question has survived the military governments, political transitions and elections that followed.
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Nigeria was already arguing about democracy
To understand Nwankwo’s book, it helps to understand the country into which it arrived.
Nigeria had spent decades moving between civilian and military rule.
The military first seized power in 1966. Civilian government returned in 1979, only for another military coup to take place in 1983.
General Ibrahim Babangida came to power in 1985 and eventually began a political transition programme that was supposed to lead Nigeria back to civilian rule.
The transition became one of the most complicated political experiments in the country’s history.
Political parties were created under military supervision. Electoral arrangements changed. Candidates emerged. Institutions were repeatedly reorganised.
Then came 12 June 1993.
Millions of Nigerians participated in the presidential election, which was widely regarded as having been won by Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola.
The military government annulled the election.
The consequences were enormous.
Protests followed. Political opposition intensified. The country entered a period of severe political uncertainty.
By November 1993, General Sani Abacha had taken power.
The democratic transition had effectively collapsed.
Three years later, when Nwankwo’s book appeared, Nigeria was therefore dealing with two questions at once.
Who should govern Nigeria?
And beneath it:
Who was actually being given the opportunity to govern?
The women were there. That was the problem
The story of women and Nigerian politics is often told as though women simply appeared on the political scene when modern discussions about gender equality began.
The historical record tells a different story.
Women had long participated in Nigerian political and economic life.
They organised markets.
They formed associations.
They mobilised communities.
They protested government policies.
They participated in nationalist politics.
They voted where they had the franchise.
They campaigned for political candidates.
They could become influential community figures without necessarily holding formal political office.
The 1929 Women’s War in southeastern Nigeria had already demonstrated the extraordinary collective political power women could exercise.
Later, women such as Funmilayo Ransome Kuti became prominent political organisers.
So the problem was not simply that Nigerian women were politically inactive.
The more complicated problem was the distance between being politically active and possessing political authority.
A woman could campaign for a candidate without becoming the candidate.
She could mobilise voters without controlling the party.
She could attend political meetings without being part of the group making the most important decisions.
She could have influence in her community while remaining largely absent from formal political institutions.
This was the gap Nwankwo was investigating.
And Nwankwo was looking at it from inside the newsroom
There was something particularly appropriate about Nwankwo taking up this subject.
She was a journalist.
Her career had begun in 1987 as a production sub editor at ThisWeek magazine.
In 1988, she joined Champion Newspapers as a senior staff writer.
By 1991, she had become Woman Editor.
She later became Deputy Editor of Sunday Champion and, in 1996, editor of the newspaper.
She therefore understood something that an outside observer might easily overlook.
Political power is partly a battle over visibility.
Before a politician can persuade voters, people have to know who she is.
Before an issue can become a public concern, someone has to put it before the public.
Before a political candidate can become nationally recognised, newspapers, radio and television must give that person space.
In 1990s Nigeria, the mass media was particularly important because the digital world that now allows politicians to communicate directly with millions of people did not exist.
There was no Facebook.
There was no X.
There was no Instagram.
There was no WhatsApp campaign network.
The traditional media had enormous influence over which political figures became visible.
Nwankwo was therefore examining political exclusion from a position unusually close to one of its potential gatekeepers.
The media could make a politician visible, or leave her invisible
One of the sections of Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics was specifically devoted to women and the mass media in Nigeria.
This was one of the book’s most significant directions.
Nwankwo was not treating political representation as something that began on election day.
She was looking at the process that came before it.
Who receives coverage?
Who is considered newsworthy?
Whose political ambitions are taken seriously?
How are female political aspirants described?
Are women presented primarily as political actors, or through their family roles, appearance and private lives?
These questions mattered because media coverage could influence how voters understood political candidates.
A politician who appeared repeatedly in newspapers could become familiar.
A politician who received little coverage could remain unknown, regardless of her qualifications.
The media could therefore become part of the political struggle itself.
Nwankwo’s book placed that relationship under examination at a time when there was little opportunity for politicians to bypass the established media.
Then there was the strange way Nigerians voted
One of the most unusual parts of Nigeria’s political transition involved the way voting was conducted.
During the 1990 transition elections, Nigeria used an open ballot system.
Instead of quietly marking a ballot paper in a private booth, voters publicly indicated their preferred candidate by standing behind the candidate’s photograph.
To a modern voter accustomed to the secret ballot, the arrangement sounds extraordinary.
Imagine arriving at a polling station and knowing that your neighbours could see exactly which candidate you had chosen.
But the system created more than an unusual voting spectacle.
It raised a fundamental question about freedom of choice.
Nwankwo criticised the open ballot system for its potential effect on women.
If a woman preferred a candidate different from the one supported by her husband, for example, publicly displaying her choice could expose her to pressure.
The secret ballot offered something the open ballot could not easily guarantee: privacy.
That distinction revealed one of the deeper arguments in Nwankwo’s work.
A political system can give citizens a formal right while creating circumstances that make exercising that right more difficult.
Everyone may technically have one vote.
But not everyone necessarily has the same freedom to use it.
The women’s wings that could mobilise voters but not necessarily make policy
The political parties created another contradiction.
During Babangida’s transition programme, parties were required to establish women’s wings intended to promote women’s participation.
This appeared to offer women a formal place within party structures.
But there was an important difference between being organised by a party and having power inside the party.
Women’s wings could mobilise women.
They could register supporters.
They could encourage women to vote.
They could campaign for party candidates.
But contemporary research drawing on Nwankwo’s work noted that women in these structures were not necessarily part of the key policy making caucuses of national party executives.
That distinction is crucial.
A political organisation may depend heavily on women for mobilisation without giving women an equivalent role in determining what the organisation actually does.
The women could be needed to win the political battle without being given equal influence over what happened after victory.
Nwankwo’s work brought attention to that contradiction.
The real barrier could appear before election day
This is where her argument became more complicated.
When a woman loses an election, it is tempting to blame voters.
But Nwankwo’s work encouraged readers to look further back.
What happened when she tried to become a candidate?
Could she obtain a party nomination?
Could she raise the money required for a campaign?
Did party leaders support her?
Did the media give her enough attention?
Did social expectations discourage her?
Could she withstand political pressure?
And, perhaps most importantly, was the political environment structured in a way that allowed her to compete on equal terms?
A woman could therefore be excluded long before a ballot was cast.
The election result was only the final stage of a process that had already begun.
Why Norway appeared in a Nigerian book
Nwankwo did not limit her investigation to Nigeria.
Her book also looked at Norway and discussed Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norwegian political leader who became prime minister.
That comparison was important.
It challenged the argument that women’s limited political representation was simply inevitable.
If another society had developed political arrangements that allowed women to reach senior positions, then Nigeria’s own political system could be examined rather than excused.
The question became less about whether Nigerian women were capable of political leadership.
It became about the structures surrounding them.
Political parties mattered.
Electoral systems mattered.
Media representation mattered.
Political culture mattered.
Access to resources mattered.
Social expectations mattered.
The comparison with Norway gave Nwankwo a way to ask a much broader question:
If political institutions can be organised differently, why should women’s exclusion be accepted as normal?
She was writing while Nigeria’s political space was closing
There is something striking about the courage of the subject’s timing.
Nwankwo’s book appeared in 1996, during the Abacha years.
That same period saw intense pressure on political opposition and the press.
Journalists were working in an environment where the boundaries of permissible political expression could be narrow.
Yet Nwankwo was examining political representation, electoral participation and the media.
She was not writing from a comfortable democratic distance.
She was a journalist living through the political conditions she was examining.
That gave the book a particular historical value.
It was a contemporary document of a country struggling with the meaning of political participation.
The book was not asking for women to be allowed into a finished system
Perhaps the most important thing about Nwankwo’s argument is what it did not assume.
It did not simply suggest that women needed to be invited into an already perfect political system.
The system itself had problems.
The voting arrangements could create pressure.
Political parties could use women for mobilisation without giving them equal decision making power.
The media could influence whose political identity became visible.
Social expectations could affect women’s ability to compete.
Political resources could determine who had a realistic chance of success.
So the issue was not simply:
How do we put more women into politics?
It was:
What has to change within politics for women to participate on genuinely equal terms?
That is a much bigger question.
The timing of the book becomes even more significant
In retrospect, 1996 sits at an interesting point in Nigerian history.
The June 12 crisis had not been resolved.
Abacha was still in power.
Nigeria had not yet returned to civilian government.
The political future was uncertain.
Yet Nwankwo was documenting a question that would outlive the regime.
Abacha died in 1998.
Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999.
The Fourth Republic began.
Political parties changed.
The media landscape expanded.
The internet eventually transformed political communication.
Yet the underlying problem identified by Nwankwo did not disappear with the military.
Women continued to face difficulties in securing party nominations, raising campaign resources, gaining political influence and achieving meaningful representation.
The government changed.
The question remained.
What makes the book worth remembering
It is easy to reduce Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics to its title.
That would miss the historical significance of the work.
The book was published at a moment when Nigeria itself was arguing over political representation.
It came from a journalist who had spent years watching politics through the newsroom.
It examined women not simply as voters, but as political participants whose route to power was shaped by institutions around them.
It connected the political system to the mass media.
It questioned the consequences of an open voting system.
It examined political parties and women’s participation.
It looked outside Nigeria for examples of how women’s political representation could be improved.
And it did all of this while the country was still under military rule.
That makes the book more than an early study of Nigerian women in politics.
It is a snapshot of a country trying to understand what democracy should actually mean.
The question that survived the military era
Nwankwo could not have known in 1996 exactly how Nigeria’s political future would unfold.
But she had identified a problem that did not depend on the survival of one government.
The issue was not simply military rule.
It was the distribution of political power.
Who gets nominated?
Who gets funded?
Who gets media attention?
Who gets believed?
Who gets to make decisions?
Who is expected to mobilise others rather than lead them?
And who gets remembered as part of political history?
These questions did not disappear when the military left power.
They followed Nigeria into the Fourth Republic.
That is why Nwankwo’s 1996 book remains interesting.
She was writing about the Nigeria she could see.
But she was also identifying something much deeper.
A country can hold elections without everybody having an equal route to political power.
It can have political parties without everybody having equal influence inside them.
It can have women participating everywhere without women being proportionately represented where the final decisions are made.
Nearly three decades later
Nigeria is a very different country from the one Nwankwo knew in 1996.
The country has experienced several uninterrupted cycles of civilian government.
Political communication has been transformed by the internet.
Social media has given politicians new ways to speak directly to voters.
Women have occupied important political offices at federal and state levels.
Yet the larger question remains stubborn.
How much political power do Nigerian women actually possess, and what stands between political participation and political authority?
That is the question Nwankwo placed at the centre of her work.
And perhaps that is why her book deserves to be remembered not merely as a publication from 1996, but as a challenge from one generation of Nigerians to another.
Nigeria has changed.
Its governments have changed.
Its technology has changed.
Its political parties have changed.
But the question remains remarkably familiar.
When will political participation become political equality?
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Author’s Note
Nkechi Nwankwo’s 1996 Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics was published at a remarkable moment in Nigerian history, when the country was under military rule, the promise of the June 12 election had been destroyed and the meaning of democratic participation was being fiercely contested. Her work went beyond asking why there were so few women in political office and examined the institutions surrounding them, including political parties, electoral arrangements and the mass media. It showed that women could be active voters, organisers and campaigners while still being excluded from the places where political decisions were made. The lasting lesson is that representation is not simply about allowing people to participate; it is about whether they have a genuine path from participation to power.
References
Nwankwo, Nkechi. Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics. Deutchetz Publishers, Lagos, 1996.
AfricaBib. Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics. Bibliographic record, 1996.
Google Books. Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics. Nkechi Nwankwo, Deutchetz Publishers, 1996.
New York Public Library. Research catalogue record for Gender Equality in Nigerian Politics.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Journalist Fellows Pre 2006.
Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation. “Nwankwo, Nkechi Eke.”
University of Ibadan Repository. Scholarly discussion of women’s political participation, political parties and the open ballot system, citing Nwankwo’s 1996 work.
