Nigerian women protest for reserved seats in parliament

ABUJA, Sept 22 (AFP): Hundreds of women protested in the Nigerian capital Monday to push for a bill that would add women-only seats in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Several African countries, from Senegal to Rwanda, have increased the number of women legislators by using quota systems.

Nigeria, which has no such system, only counts four women senators out of 109 and 16 women in the 360-member House of Representatives, according to the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC), a local NGO.

Dubbed the "Special Seats Bill", the legislation would add one woman-only seat for both the House and the Senate in each of Nigeria's 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, though implementing the changes would require a constitutional amendment.

"We want the legislature to work for women," said Dorothy Njemanze, one of the organisers, who said she had counted more than 1,000 demonstrators in attendance.

Women's groups from across the country converged in Abuja, organising acaravan of buses, vans and a truck blasting up-tempo Afrobeats music that snaked through the wide boulevards of the planned city.

Advocates say that reserved seats would serve as a corrective to the financial barriers, entrenched gender roles and a domination of politics by male power brokers that keep women out of power in Africa's most populous nation.

The caravan ended with the delivery of signatures in support of the legislation to a House committee holding a hearing on constitutional reform.

President Bola Tinubu's minister for women's affairs, Hajiya Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, has signalled support for the legislation.