By Eunice Orike
A nongovernmental organization known as the Gender Strategy Advancement International has held its first Godmother’s Mentorship Series which is an initiative aimed at nurturing emerging voices of young female leaders.
Speaking with journalists in an interview, the former first lady of kwara state and the Founder/President of the Well- being Foundation Africa, WBFA, Toyin Saraki advocated for females who have political ambition to always stay close to their communities by earning their trust before coming out for elections.
She stressed that “if women can be advocated for more enlightenment and formal activities amongst women, even within their parties, then most women have a chance of being chosen as delegates, and once there are female delegates, they have a voice and vote even within the party.”
She emphasised that the best form of advocacy is action and that there is a need to have women out there taking the opportunity to run, making sure that on merit, they are the best candidates and persuading other women to vote for them.
“I think it is seeing activity in action that gives people the courage, they shouldn’t just be showing up every four years, they should always stay close to their communities through the entire election and non-election circles so that both the stakeholders and the people feel that they are there”, she said.
She said the organisation is determined to put together modalities on how younger experts can be more schooled and knowledge driven.
“The godmother Mentorship Series, I believe we are here today to begin to talk about how we are going to work in our different fields to become experts, and are meeting with the younger experts who wish to rise, and we are putting together modalities by which they can school us too to learn from each other so that by the time the next elections take place in Nigeria, we would have empowered ourselves to be able to lead”, she said.
She hinted about preparing the women and girls to understand that “the investment that we mean in the education of the children is what really creates adults.”
“So, we don’t wait until it is time to select people for leadership before we start looking for who is good”, she added.
According to her, “In the Wellbeing Foundation Africa, we are working with the children right from when they are in school until when they enter university, with the curriculum that first teaches them respectful relationships, about looking up to themselves, self-care, dignity and also about having autonomy.”
She explained that leadership should not be by endurance, but should be by merit, adding that what the organisation is trying to do is to create a higher and larger pool of those who can merit leadership.
Furthermore, Saraki explained that when women gather and when women resolve, there is always a transformation.
“As you see, we are starting very early in the election cycle, but elections are not just about presidential and gubernatorial, you are also going to look at the local government elections, we even have to look beneath that. The trend of election and who wins is not actually decided on the election day, it begins within the party, and each party chooses its candidate”, she said
Also speaking, Senator Biodun Olujimi who spoke on political activism said the young ones must be motivated to be able to come and be part of the discourse.
According to her, without that, all the problems will not go away except we are talking about it. As you know, young people are very vibrant, they are a lot more energetic than some of us, but they are usually skeptical when it comes to political participation, saying “time for us to work is now.”
On her part, the Executive Director of the organisation, Adaora Onyechere Sydney-Jack said that the GodMother Mentorship Series is about bridging the gap for leadership especially for young women.
She gave instances at the fact that the 2027 general elections are around the corner and lamented that the membership of the parliament and number of women are small.
According to her, “The idea is to continue to galvanise, to look at issues concerning mentorship, bridging the gap, having the conversations, but most importantly creating a lead way for the documentation of some of the stories, and ensuring that women would be able to tell the story.”
She pointed out that the agency called Africa is always being in the story of exclusion and that means that the narrative and the gender parity will continue to resonate.
“The right thing to do is looking at what is important at a time and in the next election circle. Election violence would be there, how do we navigate in-between the lines and to also look at election financing, which is a huge burden on the African woman and for the Nigerian woman”, she said.
