Nigerian women protest parliament rejection of pro-equality bills
Published: 2/Mar/2022
Source: Al Jazeera
The women were demonstrating against a parliamentary vote discarding five bills to grant Nigerian women more autonomy.
By Ope Adetayo
Nigerian women have converged at the country’s parliament in Abuja to protest its decision to vote against the adoption of five gender bills.
As early as 8am on Wednesday, hundreds of women showed up at the National Assembly Complex in the Nigerian capital to demonstrate against the Senate’s decisions at yesterday’s constitution amendment session.
‘’I am here [at the protest] because I am angry,” Nimisire Emitomo, a 25-year-old writer, who joined others to sing and chant about Nigerian legislators neglecting their concerns at the parliament gates. “When I saw the vote yesterday, the first thing that came to my mind is why do they hate us so much? They are literally saying we are second-class citizens,’’
After two years of deliberations, the legislature had voted on a series of bills to amend the controversial 1999 constitution, adopted during the transition from military rule to democracy that year.
One of the amendments, if passed, would have granted citizenship to foreign-born husbands of Nigerian women; the Nigerian constitution already confers automatic citizenship on foreign-born wives of Nigerian men. Another would have given a woman the right to become indigenes of their husband’s state after five years of marriage.
Read further: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/2/nigerian-women-protest-parliament-rejection-of-pro-equality-bills