By Matthew Tabe
The senator representing Ekiti South Senatorial District, Biodun Olujimi has said that the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill was first rejected by the wives of senators before her colleagues later killed it with overwhelming rejection in plenary.
Senator Olujimi stated this at a one-day Policy Dialogue on the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill in Nigeria organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) in conjunction with UN Women and the Government of Canada on Thursday.
Olujimi explained that she mobilised other female senators, to engage the wives of the male federal lawmakers in the Senate so that they could influence their spouses to support the Bill.
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She lamented that the engagement with the wives of the senators was a disaster as the majority of them rejected the bill based on their religious sentiments and beliefs.
The Senator however said efforts are ongoing to pass the bill which had passed its first reading in the Senate, before the end of the 9th National Assembly.
“51.2 percent of the population cannot be shut out and we are sitting believing it is well. It cannot be well except that portion of the society is taken care of.
“This bill had suffered greatly in the national; it suffered three assemblies, and it is struggling in this fourth. And the reason is simple. It is only because it is based on gender.
“If it was a general thing, it wouldn’t have been so difficult.
“In the 7th assembly, I saw there was no law that governed the issues of women generally and I felt it was not good enough for a country like Nigeria to be a signatory to protocols and agreements and not be able to domesticate them in so many years.
“We met a brick wall and the brick wall was not because of the men, it was based on the nuances of the women.
“In the last senate, we gathered all the wives of senators and asked them to go see their husbands and talk to them about the bill and say we intended to pass the bill because there were more men in the Senate than women, even now there are more men than women.
“The women came back and said we cannot stand for this because my religious conviction says this has been taken care of. We tried to convince them, but most of them were not convinced,” she stated.
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She however said a new bill devoid of contentious areas has been drafted and passed the first reading in Senate.
In his remarks, the Director General of NILDS, Professor Abubakar Sulaiman, said the session was organised for the collation of views on how the gender bill can scale through when represented.
