Gender bias and citizenship rights to political participation in Nigeria : challenges for democratic consolidation and economic development

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity”. The Nigerian Constitution (1999) affirms this. However, in Nigeria, women do not enjoy equal rights and priviledges as men (Sow, 1994, cited in Isma’il, 2006). This has resulted into policies and programmes failing to address the feminine dimension of poverty. Women’s impoverished condition has generated serious global concern especially following the Beijing Conference of 1995. The aim of this paper therefore is to examine the issue of gender equity and citizenship rights to political participation and the challenges for democratic consolidation and economic development. The methodological approach used in writing this paper is content analysis. The paper observes that gender bias in any society creates serious constraint to democratic consolidation, and hence derails rapid economic growth and development. The need to urgently address the factors creating these challenges, like moral, social, economic, ethnocentric and religious, etc, issues through the adoption of the principle of proportional and rotational representation of both genders by all political parties has become highly imperative, in addition to abhorring the culture of masculine dominated policies and programmes.