Starting next week, Liberia will have a female as her President. Looks like the men tried for the past 150 something years but they could not "find" it.

Do you think women are the answer for our many political woes in Africa?

Women are weaker vessels and at same time very strict and principled set of people. I want to use Nigeria as a case study. Sometime in the University of Benin here in Nigeria,One Professor (Mrs.) Grace Alele Williams was the Vice Chancellor of the university.During her reign,UNIBEN was fully sanitised and all forms of crimes were almost fully eradicated.Let's take the present set of women ministers in Nigeria for example too.Like Dr(mrs) Dora Akinwumi,Ndidi Okereke and our dear finance Minister,Dr(Mrs) Okonjo Iweala,these are women of high repute that have transformed their various offices to a better one in the few years they have stayed.I wish to conclude by saying that WOMEN will do better in Africa if given the chance to rule.

bernieman

Fantastic. You have a high opinion of these ladies and that is admirable. My only hope is that Mrs. Sirleaf in Liberia would motivate them enough for some of them to stand for elections for the leading office in Nigeria.

With kind regards

I have been screaming Ngozi Okonjo-Iyeala for a long time but no-one is listening.

b

Women rocks!..this also signifies that women are not likley to cheat in a relationship..goo ladies i have ur back

i think that liberia's new president would do just
fine, because i believe she can bring peace also she is goin
to be a great example for africa.. i wish her luck
man have ruled Africa for since forever and where have ya gotta us
nowhere,
we have never moved forward except backwards..

Woman can not rule Nigeria respectfully, no way man, Nigerians are tough breed

I think the sibling-protection instinct in females is more developed than in males, at least in most mammals. This primitive biological tool seems to make it easier for women to be steadfast and lead well, especially in times of crisis.

I wish Dr "Ngo-o" (Ngozi) Okonjo-Iweala, or any other Nigerian woman of similar calibre, would present herself for any top political leadership position in Nigeria. I'd support her as best as I can.

blessnaija

me nko?I also want to be Presidooo come 2007...
Nairalanders,I dey campaign oooo!!!!

I will definitely support a Mrs/Madam President in Nigeria (if we can find a good one) just for the fact that she will try her best to prove the age old saying that:

What a man can do, a woman can do it even more better.

"Woman can not rule Nigeria respectfully, no way man, Nigerians are tough breed."

Umm, men have been ruling Nigeria so far, and have they been ruling it respectfully? Nigeria isn't even that respected the way it should be by other nations and is considered to be one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Seeing as how women haven't been ruling Nigeria, who can you blame that on? Don't be so quick to say women can't rule Nigeria.

In response to the original question posed that started this forum, do I think women are the answer to Africa's problems? Yes, some women are. I think that in general, people with good intentions and who care about Africa are the answer to Africa's problems. This includes women and men, and anyone that is opposed to a woman as a leader simply because she's a woman and not because of valid proof that she's inadequate is also opposed to progress.

And I'm curious, how do women being in leadership positions prove that they're likely not to cheat in relationships?

naijadiva, I agree fully with all you say. That's all true.

snazzydawn:

me nko?I also want to be Presidooo come 2007...
Nairalanders,I dey campaign oooo!!!!

Funds Snazzy's campaign with NL currency
_{chants........snazzy, snazzy, snazzy..... l o l}

naijadiva:

In response to the original question posed that started this forum, do I think women are the answer to Africa's problems? Yes, some women are.

women, answers to africa's problem? how??

There is a strong correlation between the level of women representation and women's rights and the human development index. Of course you are confronted with the chicken-or-the egg problem, but there are strong indications that investments in women are far more beneficial from an overall development point of view than in men.

but america's never had a female president?

i wonder why women seem to do better in politacal posts in nigeria maybe its because they less likely to collect bribe

dejiolowe:

but america's never had a female president?

And America is [b]not [/b]leading in the human development indicators.

I don't think we need women now, maybe later, but definitely not now. They can be used by men to achieve some good feats, like Akunyili, not Okonjo-Iweala o, I don't trust that woman. But they should not rule us now. Later, please.

ono:

I don't think we need women now, maybe later, but definitely not now. They can be used by men to achieve some good feats, like Akunyili, not Okonjo-Iweala o, I don't trust that woman. But they should not rule us now. Later, please.

What possible reason can you have to exclude women from power now?

Good question.

Answer: They will abuse it.

ono:

Good question.

Answer: They will abuse it.

And men don't?

Wassup.
Nice topic i must confess.
Female president?, well it worked in Liberia. But it can NEVER!!!! work here in Naija.
Even a MAN/MALE president goes through HELL!! ruling this country.

A female can't handle NAija. This country is too complicated for the weaker sex.

Be good.

PS: Hope u are not nursing such ambitions.

@nferyn, theirs will be worst

Bigtee:

Wassup.
Nice topic i must confess.
Female president?, well it worked in Liberia. But it can NEVER!!!! work here in Nigeria.
Even a MAN/MALE president goes through HELL!! ruling this country.

A female can't handle NAija. This country is too complicated for the weaker sex.

Be good.

PS: Hope u are not nursing such ambitions.

So you are actually saying that women are intellectually less capable?

ono:

@nferyn, theirs will be worst

Why?

Some of you are just saying that out of sexism. What reason do you have to say it will be worse if women accept bribery? How much worse can it get? Look at all the trouble brought about by all the rulers so far, and they've all been men. Most of those people benefiting from those bribes have been men so how much worse do you think a woman can make it? Once again, Nigeria is considered to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world and do you know how many Nigerians living in the U.S. don't want to go back? And whose leadership has this been under? All men. Stop condemning women on a job they haven't done.
Women are not good enough to rule naija, but they can be used by men to accomplish things? Please. If men are so great, what do they need women for? So women just need the guidance of these great men rulers to do something good? Sure, because it's been proven that men are better leaders? Judging from Nigeria's current and long-standing situation, I'd beg to differ.
And America never having a female president doesn't mean anything. America has only had white presidents, and with America's history and present perpetuation of racism and sexism and just overall discrimination, it is not the country to be looking up to.
And @dejiowole, when I said that some women are the answers to Africa's problems, I elaborated by saying that ANYBODY with good intentions towards Africa would be a solution to Africa's problems, and I said some women because I'm not generalizing and saying every woman is the solution. There are women with self-serving interests, but they are no worse than men so I think both men and women with good intentions would help.

Female Presidents in Africa is long over-due. We should start giving women some chance to manage our economy better because they have proved to be good financial managers, taking the case of Okonjo Iwela who played a very big part towards Nigerian's debt relief. Dora Akunyili is one hell of a good woman who will change this country Nigeria if given the chance.

There is a strong correlation between the level of women representation and women's rights and the human development index. Of course you are confronted with the chicken-or-the egg problem, but there are strong indications that investments in women are far more beneficial from an overall development point of view than in men

nferyn, you have to understand there is a world of difference between correlation and causation. how then do you explain the fact that africa leads the world in women representation in political power but is behind in its development index?. i think its best we leave these false ideas of women and focus on what makes peopel good. afterall from my understanding, women have fought to have these features you attribute to them removed, so they are not stereotypes as mothers and wives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/international/africa/11cnd-liberia.html?ei=5088&en=f437c0aa6bcd7336&ex=1289365200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1138888118-QC5TYQ6quL4zAjtzU5kn8g
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: November 11, 2005

DAKAR, Senegal Nov. 11 - When supporters of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
marched through the broken streets of Monrovia in the final, frantic
days of the campaign for Liberia's presidency, they shouted and waved
signs that read: "Ellen - she's our man."

It is an apt cry for the woman - known as Liberia's Iron Lady - who is
on the cusp of ruling this wartorn nation as the first elected female
head of state on a continent ruled by men for its entire modern
history.

Today, with 97 percent of the vote counted, Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, a
66-year-old former United Nations official with a degree in public
administration from Harvard, appeared to be headed for victory. She
received 59 percent of the vote to the soccer star George Weah's 41
percent.

"Everything is on our side," said Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf's spokesman,
Morris Dukuly. "The voters have chosen a new and brighter future."

Mr. Dukuly said Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf had held off declaring victory
because Mr. Weah, who won the first round of the election and enjoys
broad support among Liberia's huge youth population, has alleged that
the results were tainted by fraud.

Mr. Weah told reporters in Monrovia that he has submitted a formal
complaint to the National Election Commission, which will investigate.
International observers said that while there were some minor
irregularities, they were too small to change the outcome.

Mr. Weah, speaking to a crowd of supporters at his campaign
headquarters today, appealed for calm, but hundreds of his backers,
wielding branches, marched through the streets in protest, chanting
"No Weah, no peace."

They threw stones at the police in front of the elections commission
headquarters, and United Nations peacekeepers fired tear gas at the
crowd as they rushed through a line of riot police trying to keep them
from storming the United States Embassy, according to Reuters.

From the Cape to Cairo, from Dar es Salaam to this seaside capital,
men have dominated African politics from the earliest days of the
anticolonial struggle.

"There are so many capable women," said Yassine Fall, a Senegalese
economist and feminist working on women's rights issues in Africa.
"But they just don't get the chance to lead."

The history of the continent rings with the names of heroes like Kwame
Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, and Jomo Kenyatta , fathers of the modern
African states they helped form. And villains like Mobutu Sese-Seko,
Idi Amin and Sani Abacha, the despotic "big men" who ruled ruthlessly
over their terrorized subjects, enriching themselves along the way.

Despite the large role women played in the struggles of many nations
for independence, they were relegated to the sidelines in the
post-colonial era. The most ambitious women often went abroad, and
some - like Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf - rose to prominence working for
international organizations like the United Nations and the World
Bank.

But in recent years, African women have begun to assert their place in
the traditional halls of power. In 2004, a Kenyan environmental
activist, Wangari Maathai, won the Nobel Peace Prize, raising
immensely the profile of female African leaders.

Nigeria's finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has emerged as one of
the country's most respected and feared officials, part of a brain
trust trying to pull Africa's long-foundering giant from the miasma of
corruption and mismanagement.

Women have made gains at the ballot box in some nations. The prime
minister of Mozambique, Luísa Dias Diogo, is widely seen as a future
president. In Rwanda, there is a greater proportion of women serving
in Parliament than in any other nation, nearly half of the seats.

Indeed, Africa leads the developing world in the percentage of women
in legislative positions - at about 16 percent, according to the
Inter-Parliamentary Union, an organization of parliamentary bodies
worldwide.

Yet having more women leading does not necessarily mean decisions that
benefit women. While research has consistently shown that women
generally make decisions that favor women and children, when they get
political power it is often - at first - as an embattled minority that
feels it must follow the lead of men in order to maintain power, said
Geeta Rao Gupta, the president of International Center for Research on
Women in Washington.

"When there is a critical mass of women leaders, they gain confidence
over time and are more likely to exhibit diversity of experience as
women in their decisions," Ms. Rao Gupta said. "It is a good start but
not an automatic thing. It takes a few cycles to really sink in."

Liberia's presidential election comes two years after the nation
emerged from a brutal civil war that killed more than 200,000 people
and displaced a third of the population. Pushed from power by a rebel
insurgency, Charles Taylor, the warlord who became Liberia's president
and fomented a series of bloody wars that wracked the region for more
than a decade, went into exile in 2003.

He left behind a nation shattered by war, with the entire
infrastructure, from roads to electric wires to water pipes, rotted
away or looted. Liberia today, despite its natural wealth in gems,
rubber and timber, is one of the world's poorest and least developed
nations.

Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf has been known as Liberia's Iron Lady since she
ran against Mr. Taylor for president in 1997 and was jailed for 18
months by the regime of the former dictator, Samuel Doe. She will have
no trouble fitting into the all-male club of African heads of state,
said Ms. Fall, who has known her for years.

"She is fearless," Ms. Fall added. "No men intimidate her."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4428434.stm

BBC News website

African women are celebrating, as Liberia's Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
looks set to become the continent's first elected woman president.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
Mrs Sirleaf says she want to bring motherly sensitivity to her job

The 67-year-old grandmother said she hoped her win would "raise the
participation of women not just in Liberia but also in Africa".

"It's a historical phenomenon, which is going to be an example to
other African countries... I could scream my heart out," Nigerian
politician Sarah Jubril told the BBC's World Today programme. So is
Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf's apparent victory the start of a trend?

Ugandan academic Sylvia Tamale says African patriarchal societies like
to see women firmly in their place. She quotes a Ugandan man at a
woman candidate's parliamentary campaign rally in 1996 asking: "Have
you ever heard a hen crow?"

Yet, despite these traditional values, African women can crow success
on a number of fronts.

Leading the world

For the past two years Rwanda has led the world in parliamentary
representation for women.


Women are becoming more involved in making decisions in the village
Kulah Balo
Liberian farmer

Its case is more unusual given the large number of people, educated
and moneyed, who returned from the diaspora after the 1994 genocide -
but it does reflect the trend in countries moving from post-colonial
turmoil to multi-party democracy.

In rankings compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Mozambique,
South Africa and Burundi have more than 30% of parliamentary seats
held by women, compared to an average of 19% for their contemporaries
in Europe.

Send us your experiences of being a woman in Africa

New constitutions like those adopted in Burundi and Rwanda ensure
ethnic and gender quotas, while political parties like South Africa's
ruling African National Congress have quotas for women candidates.

Grassroots

Affirmative action has it critics, but as Kulah Balo - a woman farmer
in Sinje village in Liberia - illustrates things are changing even in
remote areas.

Wangari Maathai
Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize

"Women are becoming more involved in making decisions in the village.
Before, when the men held public gatherings here, they told us women
to stay behind. If we went, they wouldn't let us say anything," she
told the BBC.

Mrs Balo says with more educated women in the public eye, ordinary
Liberian women have been given a sense of empowerment.

"Before whatever the man said would go but now both husband and wife
take decisions together."

And it was fighting a cause for ordinary women that won Kenya
environmentalist and politician Wangari Maathai international
recognition.

Known for her tree-planting campaigns, last year she was awarded the
prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for promoting social, economic and
cultural reforms.

Mrs Sirleaf and Mrs Maathai share - as well as iron determination - a
feminine approach to politics.

Mrs Sirleaf says she wants "to bring motherly sensitivity and emotion
to the presidency" as a way of healing the wounds of war.

Queen-makers

Feminine sensitivity, however, is not something that is immediately
associated with Zimbabwe's Vice-President Joyce Mujuru, whose nom de
guerre during the 1970s liberation struggle was "Spill Blood".

Nigeria's finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was once vice-president of the World Bank

Analysts believe she was picked as President Robert Mugabe's number
two last year, not only because she is from his ethnic clan but
because her husband, Solomon Mujuru, once led the army and can still
guarantee their loyalty.

This is a slight role-reversal. In the past, it was by pulling strings
from behind the scenes that women managed to exercise power.

In Rwanda, former first lady Agathe Kanziga, married to the late
President Juvenal Habyarimana, and her family kept a firm grip on the
steering wheel until 1994.

'Iron Ladies'

But despite concerns about Mrs Mujuru's leadership qualities, she has
earned respect for going back to school to finish her education as
well as taking up a ministerial post after independence in 1980.


Edith Nawakwi (The Post)
We [women] are in the majority
Zambian presidential hopeful Edith Nawakwi
And education remains the biggest challenge as girls' schooling is
often sacrificed in favour of boys - for example in Benin only 47% of
girls attend primary school compared to 61% of boys.

After Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf, a former World Bank economist, perhaps
Africa's most powerful woman is Nigeria's feisty Finance Minister
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. A one time vice-president of the World Bank, she
is waging war on corruption in Nigeria and has negotiated a debt
relief deal worth $18bn (£10bn).

Mozambique's Prime Minister Luisa Dias Diogo is another former World
Bank employee, who shares the nickname "Iron Lady" with Mrs
Johnson-Sirleaf.

In a strange coincidence, Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf will be Liberia's second
female head-of-state, after Ruth Perry who acted as a transitional
leader for a short time in the late 1990s.

Competition

Another concern for African women campaigners is that women are often
raised to see each other as competitors.

Mozambican PM
Luisa Dias Diogo is tipped to be Mozambique's president one day

Without unity, Zambia's National Women Lobby Group argues that women
will have no hope of capturing the presidency next year.

This week the umbrella group announced it was backing the candidacy of
the FDD's Edith Nawakwi.

"This is the first time the women's movement has clearly indicated to
the country that it needs to take seriously the issue of having a
female president," Ms Nawakwi said - urging women to go and register
to vote.

"We are in the majority."

Despite the fact women are a majority in Africa, to gain a meaningful
mandate they need the respect of their male constituents and
colleagues.

Ingredients

Even high-ranking female politicians can sometimes be treated with
little or no respect.

Three years ago, Uganda's then Vice-President Specioza Kazibwe
revealed that she had been forced to leave her husband after he had
assaulted her.

The revelation caused a stir in Uganda, where wife-beating is not uncommon.

In Liberia, Mrs Sirleaf will need to win over the ex-combatants, who
largely favoured the brawn of her opponent, the ex-footballer George
Weah.

With so many obstacles, female politicians in Africa must often feel
it is almost impossible to get to the top.

But Mozambique's Prime Minister Diogo - tipped one day to be president
- says she just treats it like a Mozambican woman who has to create a
meal for a large family, often without ingredients.

obong:

There is a strong correlation between the level of women representation and women's rights and the human development index. Of course you are confronted with the chicken-or-the egg problem, but there are strong indications that investments in women are far more beneficial from an overall development point of view than in men

nferyn, you have to understand there is a world of difference between correlation and causation. how then do you explain the fact that africa leads the world in women representation in political power but is behind in its development index?. i think its best we leave these false ideas of women and focus on what makes peopel good. afterall from my understanding, women have fought to have these features you attribute to them removed, so they are not stereotypes as mothers and wives.

You really don't need to tell me that I don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. I am very much aware of that fact.

If you point out that Africa leads the world in women representation in politics, what timescales are you talking about? This is a relatively recent phenomenon and the impact of that is difficult to gauge currently (if ever).
A much more important element is to look at the development differences between women and men in a given society. In that regard women in Africa are not leading the pack. The literacy level of women in e.g. Nigeria is far behind that of men (74.4% for men versus 59.4% for women). Attitutudes and e.g. inheritance laws and customs do not favor women either.

Please do refrain from accusing me of attributing stereotypical roles to women, I do nothing of that sort

nferyn, YOU'RE GREAT!