(L-R) Maryam Babangida, Oluremi Tinubu and Aisha Buhari. Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Ref Photo 2: PAUL KAGAME / FLICKR. Ref Photo 3: MICHAEL G. SPAFFORD / FLICKR.
THE MINISTRY OF GENDER X SEXUALITY
Madam Has Interest
(L-R) Maryam Babangida, Oluremi Tinubu and Aisha Buhari. Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Ref Photo 2: PAUL KAGAME / FLICKR. Ref Photo 3: MICHAEL G. SPAFFORD / FLICKR.
THE MINISTRY OF GENDER X SEXUALITY
Madam Has Interest
Imagine being a non-governmental feminist organization repeatedly doing the work of the state in areas of justice for women and girls. You walk into the office of a new ‘first lady’ who has arrived at a pivotal moment, coinciding with a series of protests by women reacting to rape, femicide, and the non-conviction of sexual assault cases in your state. This is meant to be a courtesy visit to ask the first lady to support your work with her voice and to share with her some of your strategies for ending sexual violence in your state. But to your surprise, she cuts you short and says she has no plans for sexual violence advocacy, focusing only on HIV+ organizing. She thanks you for your visit and asks you to show yourself out. You walk out with your team members, shuffling in embarrassment as you exit the newly refurbished office of the first lady. It may surprise you how often scenarios like this occur in Nigeria and this reflects the very issue Patricia McFadden highlighted in 1997 when she called out the reduction of feminist involvement in state politics to just welfarist projects.
McFadden argued that African women’s movements are oriented towards filling the gaps left by structural adjustment programmes implemented by the IMF and World Bank in many African countries, and taking on responsibilities that the state should shoulder. McFadden calls this an imposed agenda that has roots in the overrepresented idea of female nurturing, warning that women must reject this trap. In this article, I reflect on the problems and non-representation of state feminism in Nigeria. State feminism is essentially feminism limited by the state; its purposes, goals, and outcomes are confined to what is permissible by the state. On the one hand, this suits the goals of women whom professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Amina Mama, refers to as ‘femocrats’. On the other hand, it becomes increasingly frustrating for any tangible feminist transformative actions, as actors must struggle through elusive loopholes to push for the equality and justice they demand from the state.
STATE FEMINISM AND FEMOCRACY
Mama attributes the rise of femocracy in Nigeria to the Babangida regime (1985-1993). She defines femocracy as an ‘anti-democratic female power structure which claims to exist for the advancement of ordinary women but is unable to do so because it is dominated by a small clique of women whose authority derives from their being married to powerful men, rather than from any actions or ideas of their own.’
Femocracy, Mama contends, is neither a sustainable political phenomenon nor does it lead to any improvements in women’s lives and political status. In fact, she argues that the long-term achievements of femocracy have done nothing but consolidate the power of the wives of the ruling elite, ‘mobilising ruling class women’s support for the most populist of the various totalitarian regimes that have ruled Nigeria.’ By becoming a front for continued access to state treasury and creating a cult of personality reverence for first ladies, Mama argues, femocracy eventually leads to backlash against the supposed domineering personality of women in a patriarchal state.
The establishment of the Maryam Babangida’s Better Life Programme (BLP), the National Commission for Women (NCW) following a new Federal government decree in 1992, and the Maryam Babangida Centre for Women and Development firmly planted Babangida and her cohorts in the media spotlight. However, these initiatives failed to make any substantial structural changes. At the inception of the NCW, which followed a federal government decree at the end of the 1989 BLP fair in Lagos, its first chairperson was scholar and feminist educator Professor Bolanle Awe, whose activist-academic work at the national level for women’s representation earned her this position. However, this appointment also put her at odds with Babangida, who wanted to consolidate the NCW and BLP under her control, especially after NCW had audited the BLP and found its structure inadequate to address or reach the grassroots.
Professor Awe would eventually be forced to resign in 1992, allowing Babangida to dominate the newly restructured NCW that was now to be headed by the first lady with an appointed director-general of the commission who would report to her. Mama in her article ‘Feminism or Femocracy?’ cites an example from 1993 when male senators, uncomfortable with Babangida’s power move, rejected a proposal for women’s committees to liaise with the NCW. They argued that this would enhance the power already wielded by the BLP and the first lady. Mama also notes how the few women in the House of Assembly during this period were harassed with insults and catcalls whenever they attempted to speak.
This pattern continues to repeat itself. In July 2024, Senator Godswill Akpabio, inheriting the masculinist politics of his predecessors, shut down Senator Natasha Akpoti and likened her speech and conduct in the house to behaviour typical of a nightclub. Similarly, we see how former first lady, Patience Jonathan, who dominated her role within the femocratic structure of her office, also complicated the political agency of her successor, Aisha Buhari. Buhari’s role as first lady was publicly limited from ‘first lady’ to ‘wife of president’—her political principals had decided not to enable a repeat of the enigmatic performance of Buhari’s predecessor, which had led to negative presumptions about the supposedly ‘dominating’ nature of the office of the first lady in Nigeria. Despite this, Buhari was still expected to undertake the public-facing projects typically associated with a post-Babangida first lady, including gender advocacy work focused on women’s rights, children’s health, and other issues.
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POPULISM’S FEMOCRACY TWIN
I am particularly intrigued by Mama’s description of Nigeria’s totalitarian military and authoritarian democratic structures as populist. Perhaps the most recent example of populist governance was President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, which clearly demonstrates how femocracy maps onto the rhetoric of populist governance. Nigeria’s post-1999 democracy has been widely criticized as undemocratic, with populism emerging as an underlying ideology from the failings of quasi-democratization in the country.
Several scholars have explored the inherent similarities between feminism and populist governance. Like populism, feminism has people-centred politics at its core. Feminism itself has populist tendencies, with a structure that highlights grievances of marginalized groups and is driven by politicized emotions. If this gives rise to feminist populism, the question becomes whether it will swear allegiance to or challenge masculinist populism. In her 2017 article, political sociologist, Akwugo Emejulu, argues that populism, in articulating popular grievances of the people, does not consider differences such as ethnic group, geographical location, able-bodiedness, literacy level, and class within the construction of ‘the people’. Emejulu calls this ideology a poison to feminism, asserting it as inimical to intersectional and redistributive feminist visions of politics. She further argues that feminism that ignores the diversity of women’s experiences can work for populist ends, especially with its legacy of simplifying and homogenizing experiences without much concern for diversity and difference. Hence, feminism that seeks illusory equality rather than transformation of economic and social order can be integrated into populist politics.
Suggesting an alternative to populist feminism, Emejulu points us to the transformative structure of a ‘feminism for the 99 per cent.’ This framework closely aligns with Molara Ogundipe’s 1994 call for a reimagination of feminist thought in Africa as Social Transformation Including Women (STIWANISM). STIWANISM acknowledges the location of African women’s issues in race, class, and international economic order, as well as (neo)colonialism, patriarchy, traditional structures, infrastructural backwardness, and women’s own internalized patriarchy.
I have established the existing concepts and thoughts of African feminist scholars in relation to non-transformative populist state feminism structures in Nigeria. Now, I will propose an extension of Mama’s concept of ‘femocracy’ to account for the broader network of actors involved in maintaining patriarchal oligarchical structures while ostensibly advocating for women’s interests. Therefore, we can think of femocracy, in its expanded form, as a pseudo-feminist power structure that extends beyond the wives of powerful men to include a network of appointed officials, such as ministers of women’s affairs, special advisors, and other allies of the patriarchal elite. This system claims to advance women’s interests but primarily serves to conserve existing patriarchal structures and perpetuate misogynistic practices.
While there are possibly other obvious instances, I, for one, observed how consolidated this network was in April 2021. A month after returning from a six-month hiatus in Dubai, a biography titled Aisha Buhari: Being Different was published by Hajo Sani, a senior special adviser to the president on women affairs and administration to President Muhammadu Buhari. In this 46-page pamphlet, Sani attempted to rewrite First Lady Buhari’s legacy, prompting us to question how the duties of a senior special advisor to the president came to include writing a memoir. This memoir strategically aimed to undo Buhari’s previous dissent in the explosive 2016 BBC interview, where she claimed that a small group of influential people had taken control of APC and President Buhari, while ultimately trying to preserve an image of a perfect, sometimes passionate, but loyal first lady.
Mama offers two imperatives for a femocratic structure revolving around the power first ladies wield. The first is the belief among femocrats that they were also leaders due to the honour accrued to them by their husbands’ positions. The second is the strategic utilization of the gender question to attract economic aid in a global climate embracing women’s demands for gender equality. For this expanded model of femocracy, several overt characteristics emerge including an illusion of people-centred politics and elite tokenistic representation without substantial power to effect systemic change. There is a co-optation of women’s issues through the appropriation of feminist language, especially the overuse of ‘empowerment’ rhetoric. Also, there is a prevalence of what Nigerians now call ‘stomach infrastructure politics’—where politicians provide short-term material benefits, like distributing rice or money, especially during election periods.
The femocratic network is further characterized by patriarchal negotiation, as well as superficial activism that fails to address the root causes of gender inequality. It promotes institutionalized conservatism and respectability politics, often at the expense of more radical or transformative approaches to gender justice. It also is very anti-intersectional, failing to address the diverse needs and experiences of women across different social categories. To understand how this model can offer critical insights for theorizing the present, it is essential to unpack how femocracy, as a populist state feminist structure, emerged and its lingering effect on contemporary Nigerian politics.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WOMEN POLITICKING IN NIGERIA
Nina Mba’s work remains one of the most extensive documentations of women’s political involvement in Nigeria. Prior to colonial intrusion, societies in what is now known as Nigeria had several documented instances of women with high political and military influence, from Queen Amina (modern-day Zaria) to Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura (Ibadan) and Queen Kambassa of Bonny (modern-day Rivers). Scholars like Mama have noted that the British colonial administration’s all-male army, which excluded women, set a precedent for male dominance in governance. We also see this precedent in the first occurrence of a quasi-democratic election in 1923 under the Clifford constitution of 1922. As Francis Adigwe notes, the colonial legislative body previously had no elected Nigerian members, so four seats in the Nigerian Legislative Council were opened for election: three for Lagos and one for Calabar. The electorate was restricted to adult men who were educated elites, had a gross income of 100 pounds per annum, and had lived in the choice area for twelve months. While this election represented the first elected positions for Nigerians in the colonial government structure, it also established a colonial legacy of exclusion based on gender, class, social position, literacy level, and ability. This explicit exclusion of women became a catalyst for their organizing and demands for political rights.
In the 1960s, during the early independence period, there was a significant regional divide in women’s enfranchisement between the southern and northern regions. The northern region was unwaveringly opposed to women being given the right to vote, so only women in the former southern regions were enfranchised in the 1950s, with universal suffrage coming later in 1976. Southern women like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Margaret Ekpo, and Constance Cummings-John have become synonymous with early women’s political participation in Nigeria. This was not without tensions, as Ransome-Kuti became a founding member of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), the only woman in a group of seven in the 1950s. As this council transformed into a political party, pressure mounted on civil societies—many of which Ransome-Kuti had founded or been part of—to align with the NCNC’s interests, including the National Women’s Union (NWU) and the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Societies (FNWS). Ransome-Kuti vehemently refused this integration (this has been extensively documented by Mba, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, and Judith Byfield) as she foresaw the trap of women’s assimilation into masculinist politics. Instead, she wanted women’s organizations to remain independent of political affiliations to focus singularly on the upliftment of women for whom nationalism, gender, motherhood, class, and development were inseparable.
Disagreeing with Ransome-Kuti, Ekpo resigned from NWU and FNWS in 1954, citing that they were at odds with the politics of NCNC. Ransome-Kuti herself would eventually leave NCNC in 1959 and go on to form her own political party, the Commoner’s People’s Party. This naming choice, viewed through the lens of Ransome-Kuti’s Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU) politics, we can deduce was centred on the transformative intersectional politics underpinning a feminism for the 99 per cent. While this might point to a conclusion that women in the South were more politically active, Hajiya Gambo Sawaba, arguably the most frequently jailed political activist in Nigeria, was one of the few northern women activists contesting this disenfranchisement and forming coalitions with southern women to campaign for the vote, an activism for which she was repeatedly punished.
Throughout the First Republic (1963-1966), women’s political influence was largely limited to civil societies, beginning with the first national women’s organization in 1947, the NWU. A singular departure occurred during Yakubu Gowon’s military rule when Nigeria’s first female novelist in English, Flora Nwapa, became the first female commissioner (minister) in 1970. Nwapa served as minister of health and social welfare in East Central State from 1970 to 1971, and as minister of lands, survey and urban development from 1971 to 1974. While Gowon had supported giving women the right to vote in 1973, he faced opposition from northern men. According to Mba, it was under the Olusegun Obasanjo regime in 1976 that universal suffrage was attained, when the Draft Local Government Edict No. 189 of 1976 set non-gendered qualifications for voters: being over 18, born in the area, resident in the area, and able to prove payment of tax. Mama and Mba argue that this was not particularly due to a commitment to women’s liberation but was triggered by a move towards national unity and efficient administration, as different electoral laws for different regions were seen as divisive. This makes one wonder why the North and the South till date have continued to have different criminal and penal codes, where the latter is essentially a law encoding misogyny, paedophilia and the systematic disenfranchisement of women and girls in northern Nigeria. Is national unity and efficient administration only considered when there is a benefit to granting women rights because of their sheer voting power?
Resistance continued in the North, with the ministry of information in Sokoto declaring that women would not vote in the 1976 local government elections. However, gender-segregated voting booths were provided in northern states. Despite these restrictions, women contested in these elections, including Gambo Sawaba, who won a seat unopposed on the local government council for the Sabon Gari District in Zaria. Her nomination was paid for, filed, and supported by young men and women in her ward. Mama further mentions that six women were elected in total across the northern states, including Sawaba. In Anambra state, eight women were successful in their bids for local government positions. The elections also saw a small number of women winning seats in local government councils in Lagos and Oyo states. However, despite these successes, in these elections that marked Nigeria’s universal suffrage, women represented only a tiny fraction of the 299 local government councils, thus marking the beginning of unrepresentative women’s political representation in Nigeria.
Fast forward to the Buhari-Idiagbon regime, whose War Against Indiscipline programme led to increased harassment of women, further regressing women’s rights and participation. After this regime ended in 1985, the General Babangida era brought a time when women realized they had to adapt to the grain rather than go against it to gain power. Here I am inclined to share Mama’s interpretation that this was First Lady Babangida’s vision, further driven by a need to exploit the gender question in a world that was demanding gender equality as a condition for economic aid. We can especially support this interpretation by looking to the period her tenure (1985-1993) coincides with, the aftermath of the UN Decade for Women, the rise of gender mainstreaming in international development policies, and the felt impacts of SAPs on women, creating both pressure and opportunity to address grassroots women’s issues. However, as discussed earlier, these initiatives hindered rather than enabled genuine political participation of women, a legacy that has persisted post-Babangida regime. In 2000, Ifi Amadiume made a connection between ‘cults’ of African first ladies and the phenomenon of elite, white feminists in European community organizing, which Black and African feminisms have challenged as exclusionary and performative. Their politics of non-representation is evident in the internal workings of their charities, civil organizations, and foundations, driven in numbers by illiterate lower-class women whose roles are delimited as political cheerleaders and welfare subjects, and who are often unaware of existing national or international gender equality laws or affirmative action.
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MADAM’S INTEREST CONTINUES
Today, state feminism is driven by the language of gender advocacy and women’s political power being singularly sited in the offices and bodies of ministers of women affairs, first ladies, advisors, and assistants, who must also do the housekeeping welfare work of the state. A contradiction emerges from this when the men these women are allied with are some of the most dismissive of women’s issues and human rights concerns, from maternal, sexual, and reproductive health to political inclusion, feminist politics, girl child education, child marriage, and more.
The unrelenting corruption and patriarchal politics of Nigerian men, and the assimilation of a few exceptional Nigerian women, therefore brings us to this present moment where supposed embodiments of gender equality approve the government-backed marriage of 100 girls orphaned by the surge of banditry in a local government in Niger State. They offer a slap-on-the-wrist intervention in public domestic violence cases encouraging women to return to abusive husbands despite statistics on the strong link between domestic violence and femicide. They advise women to keep quiet during disputes with their husbands to avoid abuse or maintain radio silence during a series of protests against women’s experiences of violence, from #EndWarOnNigerianWomen to #SayHerNameNigeria to all the #JusticeFor movements. They perpetuate stomach infrastructure/empowerment programmes rather than fundamental economic restructuring, maintaining a dependency relationship between citizens and cult-of-personality politicians who rely on false anti-corruption, populist, saviourist rhetoric.
In 2018, I had the opportunity to work with a group of young women as part of the Young Women in Politics Forum (YWiPF). The Nigerian Women Trust Fund launched YWiPF (Young Women in Politics Forum) in 2017 to address the systemic marginalization of young women in political structures. YWiPF aimed to tackle not only age-based discrimination but also the phenomenon where exceptional older women sometimes reinforce patriarchal norms. By creating a diverse network that transcends ethnic, class, and religious boundaries, YWiPF aimed to bridge the gap between grassroots activism and institutional politics. However, the problems inherent in this group became apparent when it was revealed that state first ladies were tasked with managing our affairs.
In a country where power politics is normatively engendered to exclude women and increase the influence of men, and where a feeble attempt at gender balance in politics is subsumed within the office of the first lady, first ladies are not exempt from the patterns and bureaucratic corruption of the male ruling class. Nigerian first ladies who often embody an identity as upwardly mobile/upper-class women became contradictions in our case. They want to believe in the promise of equitable political representation through neoliberalization, and they enact empty emotional responses rather than an explicitly political one, a condition from which they openly benefit as token, politically exceptional women. But this power and position is an illusion. It is temporary and can be easily taken away by the same male-dominated power structure that allowed it in the first place.
As state feminism pushed out Professor Awe in 1992, we continue to see the exclusion of women committed to radical social transformation. State feminist, femocratic, populist feminist structures like the first lady office and the ministry of women affairs are not for gender equality. Instead, they are positions to keep women in their place, sometimes deliberately endorsed by femocrats themselves. These are offices for ‘women everything’ that imply all other positions are for men, and a state apparatus reproducing misogyny and patriarchal normativity. Ransome-Kuti saw this vision and protested, but she was under-supported. Professor Awe was arrested and forced out. We are today, young feminists raging against the state, in the position that Ransome-Kuti and Professor Awe were, and it is our turn to continue fighting for and reimagining a truly transformative feminist politics for ourselves and those who come after us⎈
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