By Daniel Nwankwo
I sat at the edge of my seat, watching young men and women of the Theatre Arts Department of the Federal University Lokoja drop line upon line as they dramatised Nigerian politics in a command performance in honour of the inimitable Eugenia Abu, a fitting tribute, given how completely her own life embodies the argument that follows. My hands grew restless until I had pencilled down the lines below.
Someone joked that women belong in the kitchen because they know how to handle the pot. I smiled, and thought: perhaps that is precisely why they belong in politics too.
After all, our own version of politics often begins with the pot. The first campaign promise many people truly understand is the one that fills the belly. In a nation where “pot first, belly follow” has become an unfortunate political philosophy, the same instinct that gave us “stomach infrastructure,” that peculiarly Nigerian art of trading rice and provisions for votes, who better understands the value of the pot than the people who have spent generations stretching limited resources to feed families, nurture children, and hold homes together?
Managing a pot is about far more than cooking. It is planning, budgeting, balancing competing needs, making difficult choices, and ensuring that everyone eats, leadership in its purest, practical, yet least celebrated form.
Sefinat Ododo Delivers Hope to 200 Women and Vulnerable Households in Lokoja/Koton-Karfe
Politics, at its best, demands exactly these qualities: managing scarce resources, caring for the vulnerable, building consensus, and putting people before personal ambition.
This is not to say that women are automatically better leaders because they are women.
Leadership is earned by competence, character, and vision never by gender. But it is to challenge the tired notion that a woman’s place at the stove somehow disqualifies her from a seat at the council table. If she can manage a home, coordinate a family, raise responsible citizens, run thriving businesses, and excel in boardrooms, lecture halls, and professions of every kind, what logical argument remains against giving her a stronger voice in shaping public policy?
We do not have to imagine the proof. Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala brought a homemaker’s discipline to Nigeria’s books as Finance Minister, negotiated away $18 billion of national debt, and now runs the World Trade Organisation. Half a world away, Angela Merkel steered Germany through the Eurozone crisis on a philosophy borrowed straight from the kitchen table , the thrifty “Swabian housewife” who never spent more than she earned. The pot, it turns out, has always been excellent training for high office.
Perhaps the problem with Nigerian politics has never been that too many women are involved, but that too few ever get the chance. Women hold barely four percent of the seats in our National Assembly, and not a single one of Nigeria’s thirty-six states currently has a female governor, numbers so stark they have birthed a national campaign for a Reserved Seats Bill. If that is not proof of a nation reluctant to hand her the ladle, I do not know what is.
Maybe it is time we stopped treating the pot as a limitation, and started reading it for what it has always been, evidence of the discipline, resilience, and administrative capacity that Nigerian politics so desperately needs.
If they can steer the pot, they can certainly steer pot-litics.
Daniel Nwankwo anipr, mpmc manupa, is the Deputy Director Protocol, Federal University Lokoja
