Ahead of the 2023 general elections, Toyin Saraki, the wife of former Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has stated that Nigerians must question candidates on their plans for gender equality.
According to her, “So it’s quite clear, especially what is happening in Nigeria now, but we are going to look at the way we engage with the war for gender equality and we are going to have to exercise our voting right actually. We are going to ask our candidates questions before we vote for them, not after we vote for them.”
Commenting on the theme, ‘Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow’, Saraki stated that, “With the women’s protests going on in Nigeria at the National Assembly, the world has quite a bit more work to do, but I am very confident that the Nigerian woman is hardworking, she may have been disappointed, but she is undaunted and she will succeed.”
Also commenting on issues caused by gender and disability in Africa, she stated that, “So disability has a higher problem in lower-income countries, where 80 per cent of the people with disability are not counting, though old people with disability face discrimination and are often invisible in policies formulation, but women and girls with disabilities are subjected to double discrimination and this is so because of their gender bias.”
Saraki noted, “So we need to recognise that the African culture hides disability, we hide and look after them in the home, but because we are hiding, the disabled ones cannot access available facilities. When I saw all the people bringing out disabled children, I was asking them, I didn’t know you have a disabled child and their response was that they never knew how they could access help.”
She remarked, “So we should stop the stigmatisation because most of them had no knowledge of who to go to for help or how to access available facilities.”
https://punchng.com/2023-candidates-must-be-questioned-on-gender-equality-says-toyin-saraki/?amp
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