Nigeria’s 2027 presidential race will put 18 tickets before voters, but only two are headed by women, leaving women with 11.1 percent of the presidential field in a country where they made up 47.5 percent of registered voters at the last general election.
Development Diaries reports that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) published its final list of presidential candidates and running mates on 12 September, with 16 of the 18 presidential candidates being men and two women, while the commission’s National Assembly list contains 1,303 candidates for 109 Senate seats, including 123 women and 1,180 men.
The 123 women on the Senate list sounds like progress until the figure is set against the 1,303 candidates competing for 109 seats, leaving women with just 9.4 percent of the field, while the state-by-state spread is even more revealing, with Jigawa, Nasarawa, Niger and Yobe recording no female Senate candidate and Akwa Ibom recording ten.
The presidential list tells a similar story at the top of the ballot, with President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Peter Obi of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Adewole Adebayo of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Oluseyi Makinde of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), Donald Duke of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), Chibuzor Okereke of the Labour Party (LP), Omoyele Sowore of the African Action Congress (AAC) and other male candidates making up 16 of the 18 tickets, while Okwori Fredrick of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and Esther Okereke of the National Redemption Party (NRM) are the two women seeking the presidency.
The Senate figure also needs to be read carefully because a candidate’s presence on the ballot says little about the strength of the contest they are entering. A woman contesting under a party with little electoral structure in a particular senatorial district faces a very different race from one running under a party that has repeatedly won the seat, but the final candidate list treats both as equal entries.
INEC publishes the candidates, but the public still has little consolidated information showing how women are distributed between competitive and less competitive seats.
That makes the 123 figure useful as a starting point, rather than a measure of how close women are to political power. A woman can survive the nomination process and still face the cost of building a campaign, mobilising supporters and navigating a party structure where access to delegates and influential networks can shape the outcome long before election day.
Money enters the process early, as political parties set their own nomination fees, and the amounts can be substantial.
The ADC, for example, set its 2027 Senate nomination fee at ten million naira after revisions, while the Labour Party set its combined Senate expression-of-interest and nomination fees at ten million naira.
Both parties also announced concessions for women, although the size and structure of those concessions differ.
Other parties have taken similar measures, with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) announcing waivers on nomination fees for female aspirants, while the AAC approved a 50 percent waiver on nomination forms for women.
These concessions can lower the entry cost, but the public still cannot see the full journey from women seeking the waiver to buying forms, surviving screening and emerging from the primaries, leaving the points at which female aspirants fall out of the process largely hidden.
The primary is another filter because once the nomination form is paid for, an aspirant still has to survive screening, compete for a party ticket and build enough support within the party to emerge as its candidate.
For a woman without money, political connections or a strong network of delegates, each stage can become another point at which a candidacy disappears before voters ever see her name.
Then there is the campaign itself, where women who enter politics face the additional cost of harassment, intimidation and attacks on their reputation, family and private lives.
The calculation can become less about whether a woman believes she can win and more about whether she can afford what the contest may demand from her personally.
Nigeria’s constitutional and policy framework recognises women’s political participation, even though the numbers remain low, with the National Gender Policy setting a 35 percent affirmative-action target for women in elective and appointive positions, while Section 42 of the constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds including sex and Section 40 protects freedom of association, including political association.
Nigeria has also ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Maputo Protocol, both of which contain provisions on women’s participation in political and public life.
The gap becomes more consequential when viewed from the communities whose interests legislation is supposed to serve. Women are heavily affected by laws and policies on maternal healthcare, land ownership, inheritance, child marriage, education and gender-based violence, while rural women face additional barriers of distance, cost and limited access to party structures.
Women with disabilities face another layer of exclusion, and the data problem begins before the campaign does because Nigeria’s public candidate information does not provide a clear, consolidated picture of candidates by disability status.
That makes it difficult to establish how many women with disabilities are contesting in 2027 or whether political parties are creating accessible routes into their nomination processes.
Young women face the same financial and organisational barriers while often having less political capital to draw on. A first-time aspirant under 40 who lacks substantial resources and established relationships within a party hierarchy has to overcome several barriers before reaching the ballot.
The useful accountability questions therefore begin with the data already held by the institutions and political parties. INEC has candidate information, while parties have records of forms purchased, aspirants screened and candidates cleared.
So the commission publishing candidate data by sex, age and disability status would give citizens a clearer picture of who is entering the political system and where representation falls away.
Publishing the number of nomination forms purchased and the number of candidates eventually cleared, disaggregated by sex, would show whether fee waivers are translating into more women surviving the nomination pipeline.
The 2027 election at the federal level will be held on 16 January, giving political parties, electoral observers and citizens a defined period in which to examine the numbers beyond the headline figures.
For now, 18 presidential tickets contain two women, while 123 women are among the 1,303 candidates seeking 109 Senate seats, and those figures tell a story that becomes harder to dismiss when the political pipeline is followed from the price of a nomination form to the party primary and finally to the ballot.
