Women Politicians In Nigeria

"Nollywood should get ready for the new faces. Working with young people has really touched my life; so, anytime I hear that they have something new to work on, I quickly jump on it and support them."

"Everyone makes mistakes, but admit your own before you point out someone else’s."

"Build a proper structure for yourself and your brand. Get an office, a good website, social media presence, business name etc."

"I draw inspiration from happenings around me. I could get an idea and when I am in the bathroom taking a shower I develop it. Later on maybe during a massage, I could give the concept a deeper thought."

"We need to shoot more movies that promote and celebrate our culture. Right now, it should be all about presenting our stories to the Western world. I think Nollywood needs to shoot more indigenous, historical movies to tell our stories like ‘Sango’ and all of that. We can change the Nigerian narrative through our films. I believe Nigerian filmmakers have a lot of power in their hands to change our society and even hold our politicians accountable."

"Now is not the time to stay silent and the youths must overcome."

"You can’t force talent or do something simply because someone else is doing it."

"I want to encourage you to work hard, believe in yourself and never rely on others for validation."

"I’ll never regret the love I gave anyone, even if it wasn’t reciprocated. Love always comes back full circle, that love is coming back to me in some shape or form. Keep putting love into the universe, because it’s coming back with interest!! No Regrets, Just Lessons To Grow!!"

""In your flaws are hidden your strength. Your perfect imperfection will lead you to change."]"

"I appreciate the mistakes I made in the past cause it is shaping my future."

"Take your heart back from the past, take your mind off the irrelevant, and take the time to be better."

"People should never regret. If it is good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it is experience."

"The creator of the stars, mountains, oceans, galaxies is not too busy for you. He is available and accessible. You do not need a special place or a religious person to talk with Him, just talk with Him. He is right here and He is obsessed with you!"

"I think every country has to work out its own model because the old global consensus is over."

"Learn which parts of yourself to nourish and which sections to heal."

"When you allow people to steal brazenly, there is no text book theory needed to tell you there is a need to enhance controls and reporting or you will have problems."

"When there are no limits and boundaries on the application of public funds, an economy cannot grow."

"There is no theory of economics that suggests that an economy can grow doing what we have been doing."

"when you add the enabling infrastructure, the work being done on ease of doing business with the natural talent and entrepreneurism of our people, it is easy to become very optimistic about our long term future."

"Public service is hard work, not about seeking glory."

"I think we must stop stereotyping some of these issues. The truth of the matter is that there is an evolution of society. At one point, you have one breadwinner, at another point you have more than one breadwinner and a different kind of context and environment. How do we empower everyone to have a role and a place in the home, in the workplace and in society? I think if we do that, we will balance the decisions that we take and we will not be shut out of it."

"In Nigeria, it is quite shocking to see the low levels of women in parliament – both in the Senate and the House. And that we actually have men actively opposing efforts to reduce their capacity. I think here, Nigeria needs to change its strategy and it needs to start on the local level of the parties. Again, I see the great capacity of women in Nigeria to participate, so I don’t think that’s our challenge. Our challenge is the construct and what the male community puts into it."

"We definitely need more women in decision-making and particularly in parliaments. For example in the DRC, they have a constitution that acknowledges parity, but they need the law to effect that. And in addition to the law, they also need to make investments in women, their education, their ability to actually participate in diplomacy and therefore, in the decision-making that goes along. In addition, there are a number of investments that need to be made in line with the laws aimed at empowering women."

"First of all, I think Africa is trying to make those strides that are necessary to achieving SDG 5 (Gender Equality). But the approach to development in Africa has always been ad hoc, and I think we have been pitting some of our greatest challenges against each other in terms of making choices. For example, we will say, Well we have to make a choice between a woman and health. Or a woman and an education budget. And I think this is where we have got it wrong. The fact is that women are an integral part of any investment, be it in health, in education, in agriculture, etc. Africa needs to recognise that our human resources are the biggest asset base that we have, and to ignore investing in 50% of it, is just foolhardy and affects results, as well as the rights that women have in their lives."

"And I think that we have to think and listen to what the leader is saying and doing, rather than judge what’s in the closet."

"As human beings, what we look to is what they stood for."

"And there has to be a huge amount of courage that what you’re doing is shaping the future. I mean, concretely, shaping that future for your people with what you know is the right thing."

"We learn to have pride and independence of one’s being, how that contributes from the inside out."

"You’re not just looking at capacities and skills to connect to the outside world without understanding anything about who you are, and the part that you play in your own ecosystem."

"To begin to build the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy, by putting the digital in front so that we’re not waiting until oh, Africa is ready, or Africa has the resources right at the beginning."

"I think early childcare is not in a classroom, but very much in Africa today, it needs to start with adult literacy and mothers because as African women, and in our cultures"

"For the first time we’re not putting a band-aid on the problem, we’re looking at the root causes."

"We are better investing now because we just won’t be able to afford it later."

"We must design a future that is shaped by women and girls that realizes their right and aspirations to a world where equality is reality."

"Innovative instruments including blended finance can all play an important role, but we need to massively scale-up that delivery."

"I think he’s given me fodder for my advocacy. Because when I go back into those sterile rooms, that somehow craft language that I don’t understand, and many people don’t understand, we can break it down. And this is where I think the partnership with the media is so important. This is a new partnership that we need to have."

"I listened to an elder just three days ago, and his eyesight had gone. And all he said was ‘we’re very grateful for what you’ve been able to give us here, but there’s a lot of people you can’t see that haven’t been able to get to this’. And the first thing he said was women and people with disabilities. And it just made me think, ‘wow, this person right now is not talking about can we have more for me and my tribe’, which is what generally gets into a story, he’s been very specific about the people that are being left behind, that we don’t see."

"I think there’s a disconnect between science, the 1.5 degrees and the reality on the ground. We need to link it, we need to say a third of Pakistan is underwater, because we’ve just had floods that are melting glaciers, and we can tie that to China, and it’s industrial pollution. We can do all this. So how do you tell the story?"

"Those are real stories. They are real situations that have to sometimes find their way into the media, into the headlines. Not so much the misery of it, but the way that we can prevent it and then link that to the 1.5 degrees."

"And then the livelihoods of all these Maasai women and men that I met, their livelihoods, their cattle have died. You see the carcasses on the road. And we don’t want to talk about that much. But that’s assets that have just been taken away. And so when Kenya is dealing with that, they’re saying, ‘okay, right now, the private sector is coming in, and we’re asking them to put a fund together, so they buy the cattle before they die’. So there are resources for that community, for the hard times, and they can replenish stock. Then we have put things together that will help us to build back with a level of resilience."

"There are so many. Climate for me is the biggest challenge that we have, and opportunity. So when a farmer says to me that this is not about a flood, or temperatures, it’s about I wake up in the morning and my crop is gone because of a dust storm, and that dust storm has come because of drought, and my farm is gone, my livelihood is gone."

"The policy somersaults that we are feeling right now, I guess they feel them in the United Kingdom, they feel them in countries in Europe now that are going so far right from being so far left. So, it’s important, and then I think that, the more we educate people, the better constituencies we have for engaging. You can’t engage with one person, one vote, when there is quite frankly, a lack of education as to understanding why the vote, and what’s my vote worth? Is it $5? Or is it educational reform, and health services, and things that are my rights, that’s what my vote is. So it’s a little bit of a journey, as you know, the long road to freedom – the road is still being tracked."

"We need to think, ‘what is the low hanging fruit for a politician that is bound by a four or five-year cycle of democracy and elective office, to one that is longer?’ Longer term means you need institutional memory; that means that the services the institutions need to be able to carry us through these different cycles of elections."

"Then you hear what’s going on in South Africa with AI, and you’re thinking, ‘okay, what is the transition going to look like? How do we build that capacity? How do we look at the financial architecture, which was really built for another era, and not for our development – [what about] access courses or even profiting from the natural resources that we have, so that we can build?’ And so it’s going to be complex, because we are many, and our issues are very complex."

"I think we’ve been told what to do and what’s good for us. And we have to come back and determine what is good for us. That’s why I said for education, it’s really important we think about that. And we think about what skills are going to put a kid, from when they get into school for 15 years, to the workplace? Is it the skills of tomorrow?""

"So what common ground can they come together on to move us forward? And I think that the fact that we’re seeing no solidarity with Africa right now has actually empowered a conversation. I think the United Nations has been helpful for a sanguine Economic Commission for Africa that did a lot of work with the Minister of Finance. So they were able to take the issues in an international arena and argue them, and it’s quite difficult for our people to do that because essentially, they’re in their own bubble, fighting the day-to-day challenges of broken democracies and an incredibly different set of difficult situations, conflict, etc."

"Even I, as an African, say to people, ‘oo, I’m the United Nations’. That’s their conversation they need to have. I can have a private one as well, as a brother or sister conversation to them. But in this piece here, give them space, because every one of them has baggage, and that baggage is colonial. And many of them are tied to it inextricably, and it’s hard."

"We have a responsibility as followers to get behind them to do the right thing. So conversation, really serious conversation. Whether it happens in the African Union [AU], and I have to tell you that in the AU, when leaders try to get together to have a closed-door meeting, the international community wants to be in on it."

"Everybody’s got a closet, and some worse than others. But if that person takes a good message that does no harm, that brings people together, that forwards Africa, we need to find that community."