On the heels of another Nigerian election, I recently watched an episode of The Leading Woman Show on the season The Nigeria We Want, and a point made by Adebola Williams stayed with me. He argued that women should not wait to see what is set aside for them or what handouts are offered. Instead, women should convert their numerical strength and voting power into negotiating power.
The point struck me because it reframed an assumption that often sits at the center of conversations about women and politics. We tend to discuss women as though they exist at the margins of political life, waiting to be included. But that framing misses something important.
Nigerian women are deeply embedded in the political system. They mobilise communities, organize campaign activities, activate religious and market networks, sustain grassroots engagement, and consolidate votes. They are often the machinery behind political participation itself. Yet a question remains: if women contribute so significantly to building political outcomes, why does that participation so rarely translate into political power?
Perhaps the question is not why women are absent from politics. Perhaps the more important question is why political systems repeatedly convert women’s labour into electoral value without converting that value into decision-making power.
Organising versus Leadership: The Gendered Allocation of Roles
From an early age, societies communicate expectations about who should care, who should support, who should coordinate, and who should lead. Women are frequently socialised into roles associated with nurturing, caregiving, and community cohesion. Over time, these expectations extend beyond households and shape public life. Women become the organisers of ceremonies, coordinators of social networks, mobilisers of collective action, and custodians of community welfare.
The issue is not that these roles are insignificant. In many cases, they are the very work that holds communities together. The issue is that societies often assign insignificant value to this form of contribution. While women are expected to perform the labour of organizing and sustaining communities, formal positions associated with authority and decision-making, including village he, union presidents, political leaders, and elected representatives, have historically remained dominated by men. As a result, women frequently carry responsibility without corresponding authority.
Over time, this becomes more than a cultural pattern; it becomes a system. The people who organize are not the people who decide. The people who sustain structures don’t control them.
Beyond Organizing: The Hidden Power of Women’s Networks
If political systems have historically assigned women the work of organizing, the answer may not be to reject those roles altogether. Organizing, mobilizing, and community building have often been treated as supportive rather than strategic, invisible rather than influential.
Historically, women have built and sustained some of society’s most enduring social structures: market associations, cooperative societies, religious fellowships, savings circles, professional networks, advocacy movements, and grassroots community groups. These spaces have often functioned as vehicles for care and collective action. However, they also represent something else: social capital.
Social capital matters because networks shape influence. They build trust, coordinate action, distribute information, and mobilize people around shared goals. Increasingly, global evidence suggests women’s strong leadership presence in social impact ecosystems and membership-driven organizations where influence often depends on convening power and coalition building.
History also offers examples across different contexts. First Ladies have often wielded influence despite occupying offices with no formal constitutional authority. Through advocacy platforms, coalition-building, and social mobilization, many built significant public legitimacy and shaped national conversations. Consider Michelle Obama, whose influence extends far beyond public office; she built a platform sustained not by constitutional authority but by credibility, relationships, and public trust.
From Electoral Machinery to Political Shareholders
Recognizing women’s organizing power is only part of the conversation. The more difficult question is conversion. How do organizing networks become negotiating networks? How does social capital become political capital? How does participation become leverage?
Political influence is rarely a reward for participation. More often, it is the product of organized bargaining power. This may partly explain why women remain highly visible within political systems while remaining underrepresented in formal leadership. To shift from organizing power to deciding power, women may need to move beyond functioning as the machinery of democracy and begin operating as its institutional shareholders. Systems reward structure, coordination, and bargaining power.
1. Consolidate Capital: Financing Political Participation
Politics runs on resources. Campaigns require money, logistics, visibility, coalition building, and sustained engagement. Yet access to financing remains one of the most persistent barriers to women’s political participation.
Dependence on party executives and elite gatekeepers for campaign funding can also reinforce existing power asymmetries. This is where women’s extensive social infrastructure may offer an untapped opportunity.
Across Nigeria, women already participate in systems of collective financing and economic coordination through savings groups, cooperatives, market associations, esusu, ajo, and professional networks. Global examples suggest that collective funding models can shift political outcomes. In the United States, EMILY’s List built an independent funding ecosystem around a simple idea: early financial support can significantly shape political viability. By aggregating contributions across broad networks of women, the organization created pathways for female candidates to compete outside traditional gatekeeping structures.
Nigeria also has early foundations through initiatives such as the Nigerian Women Trust Fund. The question may now be scale. What would happen if market associations, professional bodies, alumni networks, and women-led communities collectively treated campaign financing as shared political investment rather than individual responsibility?
Upgrading Party Structures: Moving Beyond Tokenism
Political parties often include women within their architecture, but not always within their centers of power. The traditional position of ‘Women Leader’ illustrates this tension. While important, such roles frequently focus on mobilizing women rather than shaping core decisions and institutional direction. This creates a paradox: women become responsible for building political momentum without necessarily influencing where that momentum goes.
If participation is to become leverage, women may need to move beyond isolated representation toward coordinated structures. Internal caucuses, cross-party alliances, and organized voting blocs can create collective negotiating power capable of shaping party outcomes.
History offers important lessons here. Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf did not emerge solely through conventional political machinery. Her 2005 campaign benefited from broad coalitions of market women, women’s networks, peace activists, and cross-religious alliances that functioned as an alternative infrastructure of support.
Playing the Game of Numbers: Lessons from the Aba Women’s War
The Women’s War of 1929, often referred to as the Aba Women’s Riot, remains one of Nigeria’s most significant examples of collective political organization. Far from being a spontaneous uprising, it represented a highly coordinated movement built through market systems, community alliances, and deeply established social networks.
At the time, colonial structures largely excluded women from formal political recognition while imposing economic policies that threatened their livelihoods. In response, Igbo and Ibibio women activated existing systems of collective action, including coordinated protest methods, economic pressure, and forms of social accountability such as ‘sitting on a man.’
What stands out is not simply resistance itself, but organization. Their collective action generated enough pressure to force institutional reforms. Proposed taxes were withdrawn, administrative structures were reconsidered, and pathways for greater participation eventually emerged..
Sponsorship versus Mentorship: Building the Leadership Pipeline
Conversations around women’s advancement must emphasize mentorship along with sponsorship. Mentors help individuals navigate systems. Sponsors actively create access within them – recommend mentees, open networks, create visibility, allocate opportunities, and use their own influence to expand someone else’s pathway into leadership.
If women’s political participation is to become more sustainable, stronger systems for sponsorship may be required. Established women leaders across business, public policy, academia, and civic leadership can play an important role in not only advising emerging leaders but also actively supporting their political pathways.
History again offers a useful example. The Women’s Electoral Lobby in Australia did more than encourage women to participate politically. The organization evaluated candidates, informed voters, and helped transform women into a coordinated political constituency capable of shaping electoral incentives.
Final Thoughts
Nigerian women have never lacked participation. The question is how those same numbers can move beyond mobilising power and begin shaping the architecture of power itself. Democracy does not only reward those who participate; it rewards those who organize, negotiate, and build systems. The future of women’s political power therefore depends not on women occupying but shaping democracy.