By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Before the cock crows in Ibadan, Mama Risikat is already awake.
She lights the fire, bathes the children, sends them off to school and ties her baby to her back. By six she is on the road to Bodija market with her basin of peppers on her head. By seven her stall is open. By noon she has argued with three suppliers, paid two levies and fed the baby twice. By evening she has cooked, cleaned, checked the homework and nursed a sick neighbour.
Tomorrow she will do it all again.
Multiply Mama Risikat by tens of millions, from the market women of Onitsha and Kano to the farmers of Benue, the teachers of Ilorin, the nurses of Calabar and the tailors of Aba, and you are looking at the hidden engine of the Nigerian economy.
And yet when the doors of power open, when the loans are given, when the contracts are shared and the cabinet is named, the women who carry this nation on their heads too often find themselves standing outside.
Nigerian women hold up half the sky. They have been given far less than half the chance.
THE ENGINE NOBODY FUNDS
Walk through any Nigerian market and count. The majority of the traders are women. Walk through the farms of the middle belt and the South, and you will find women planting, weeding, harvesting and processing a large share of the food we eat.
They run the small businesses that keep neighbourhoods alive: the provision shop, the hair salon, the bukka, the tailoring shop, the pepper grinding mill.
But ask them about capital, and the story changes.
Ask the woman in Aba who wants to expand her shoe business how many banks will lend to her without collateral she does not own. Ask the farmer in Benue whether her name is on the title to the land she has farmed for twenty years. Ask the trader in Kano whose capital was swallowed by inflation who will lend her money to start again.
Women carry the economy. But the money, the land and the credit usually belong to someone else.
When a woman has capital, she does not spend it on herself. She spends it on school fees, on food, on medicine, on her children’s future. Investing in women is not charity. It is the smartest investment a nation can make.
Give a Nigerian woman capital, and you feed a household, educate a generation and build a community.
THE MOTHERS WE KEEP LOSING
There is a darker truth.
According to the World Health Organization, Nigeria accounts for more than a quarter of all maternal deaths in the world.
Read that again. More than one in four of all the women who die in pregnancy or childbirth anywhere on this planet is a Nigerian woman.
She dies because the primary health centre in her village has no midwife. Because the road to the general hospital is broken. Because the hospital has no blood, no oxygen and no light. Because her family could not raise the money for the operation in time. As Part 9 showed, thousands of the nurses and midwives who could have saved her have left the country.
A nation that loses its mothers loses its future.
No woman should have to say goodbye to her family before she goes into labour.
THE GIRLS WHO WERE TAKEN
And there are the girls.
Under successive governments, Nigeria has watched schoolgirls taken from their classrooms: from Chibok in 2014, to Dapchi in 2018, to Kebbi in 2025. Each abduction sends the same message to millions of parents across the North: keep your daughter at home.
Insecurity, poverty and distance keep millions of Nigerian girls out of school. And a girl who does not go to school is more likely to marry early, more likely to be poor and more likely to lose her own children to preventable disease.
Educate a girl, and you change three generations at once: her own, her children’s and her grandchildren’s.
Every girl kept out of school is a doctor, a teacher, an engineer or a president Nigeria will never meet.
AT THE TABLE OF POWER
Now look at the halls of power.
In the Senate elected in 2023, women hold only a handful of the 109 seats. In the House of Representatives, women hold only a small fraction of the 360 seats. Nigeria has one of the lowest shares of women in parliament anywhere in Africa.
In its 2023 manifesto, the present government promised that women would hold at least 35 per cent of all government positions. By the government’s midterm in 2025, independent reviews found that women held about 8 of 48 ministerial posts, roughly 17 per cent, less than half of the promise.
A constitutional bill that includes reserved legislative seats for women is now before the state assemblies. If it becomes law, every Nigerian should welcome it. But a nation does not need to wait for an amendment to appoint women to positions of power. A president can do it on his first day.
Half the population cannot keep receiving a sixth of the power.
ATIKU’S ANSWER: CAPITAL, CARE, CLASSROOMS AND A SEAT AT THE TABLE
Atiku’s plan puts women at the centre, not at the margins.
Capital in women’s hands. Point 7 of his 12 Point Agenda creates a $10 billion Youth and Women Fund for startups, entrepreneurship and financial inclusion. A fund of this size, with women named in its very title, means capital for the market woman in Ibadan, the shoemaker in Aba and the farmer in Benue, so that the hidden engine of the economy finally gets the fuel it deserves.
Care that saves mothers. Point 10 commits to a healthcare overhaul: affordable basic healthcare and fixing the shortage of medical personnel. In his acceptance speech on 27 May 2026, Atiku committed to investment in primary healthcare centres and specialist hospitals. Every functioning health centre with a midwife, power and drugs is a mother who goes home with her baby.
Classrooms for every girl. Atiku has committed to free, compulsory primary and secondary education, and the campaign has set a target of getting 20 million out-of-school children into classrooms. Paired with point 8, which strengthens security through recruitment, welfare and modern technology, that means schools where girls can learn without fear.
Relief for the household. The production subsidy in the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan is designed to lower the cost of fuel and transport, and with them the price of food. In most Nigerian homes, it is the woman who stretches the household budget. When life becomes affordable again, she is the first to breathe.
A seat at the table. Atiku made his intention clear in 2022, describing his commitment to women and young people in government as “a covenant between me and the women and youths.” A president who means it can make the cabinet look like the nation on his first day.
Fund her business. Save her life. Educate her daughter. Give her a seat at the table.
A COMMITMENT WITH A HISTORY
There is another reason Nigerian women can trust this commitment.
Atiku’s wife, Titi Abubakar, founded the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation in 1999 and championed the campaign that led to Nigeria’s anti-trafficking law of 2003 and the creation of NAPTIP, the agency that still fights human trafficking today. Thousands of Nigerian girls and women have been protected and rescued through that institution.
That was not a campaign slogan. It was decades of work to protect the most vulnerable Nigerian women, long before any of today’s elections.
Protecting women was a mission in Atiku’s family long before it was a manifesto.
TO MAMA RISIKAT
To Mama Risikat at Bodija market with her baby on her back. To the shoemaker in Aba who cannot get a loan. To the farmer in Benue whose name is not on the land she tills. To the mother in labour waiting for a midwife who never comes. To the girl in Kebbi who dreams of school and fears the road. To every Nigerian woman who carries this nation and is told to wait outside.
You are not a footnote in Nigeria’s story. You are its backbone.
So share this with your women’s associations, your market women’s unions, your church women’s guilds and Muslim women’s groups, your cooperatives, your alumni associations and every family platform. Gather the women in your street and ask them: if you had capital today, what would you build? Write down their answers. Then show them point 7 of Atiku’s agenda, the $10 billion Youth and Women Fund, and his plan for healthcare and free education. Women are nearly half of Nigeria’s voters. When they move together, elections are decided.
Collect your PVC if it is ready, and keep checking with INEC until it is. On Saturday, 16 January 2027, go early, vote, stay and protect your vote until the result is pasted at your polling unit.
Tomorrow, before the cock crows, Mama Risikat will be awake again.
On 16 January, let her wake up to a Nigeria that finally works for her.
Vote Atiku. Vote Amaechi. Vote ADC.
Next: Part 23, Forgotten after service: the plight of pensioners.
#Atiku2027 #AtikuAmaechi2027 #AtikusAnswers #VoteADC #HalfTheNationFullTheChance
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
30 October 2026
