TheCable

Adewole Adebayo, presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), says women will be given major political roles If he is elected president in the 2023 general election. 

According to NAN, Adebayo said this at a three-day conference organised by the Nigerian Women 4 Good Governance in Abuja.

Speaking on the theme of the conference, ‘Good governance for better Nigeria’, he said listening to women will help in solving Nigeria’s problems.

“A government should be like a housewife. If you want to have a government that will work in Nigeria, you have to fashion the government like a housewife. The government will wake up and think of how people will eat and go to school,” Adebayo said.

“With the way I approach governance, women have a major role to play because I grew up well-taken care of. In fact, my attitude to governance arose from the fact that I grew up in innocence.

“The problems of government did not affect me that much because of the family from which I came.

“And my aim, therefore, is to make sure that however long I stay in power or government, whether long or short, I will empower families. Because failure to empower families is the problem of Nigeria.”

The SDP presidential candidate said women make up 80-85 percent of managers working in his organisation, adding that empowering them is crucial to the development of the country.

“If you want to empower families, you have to empower women. I’m also an employer of labour. I became an employer of labour when I was 22 years old so I have been employing people over time. In the course of time I have employed women and men,” he said.

“If you find out from organisations that I have been running for many years before I thought I will be in politics, 80-85 percent of my managers are women.

“It is not because they know how to dress elegantly, it’s because they know how to manage and care. The truth of the matter is that Nigerian society and the Nigerian government do not look alike.

“In Nigerian society, the women carry the verdict and the women run the show but in the Nigerian government, the men take everything. This has to change.

“If we can listen to women, we will know the problem of Nigeria and solve them.”