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Throughout Nigeria, the roles of women in different ethnic and religious communities often exist in some contrast to each other. For example, the women who inter-marry often recall painful experiences. In cases where women are the link between two very different families, they usually face the dilemma of choosing where to belong as daughters, wives, mothers and in-laws. This is particularly so when they marry into families that are of a different faith to theirs.

For instance, the Christian women living in Jos who married Muslim men and Muslim women who married Christian men that I spoke to informed me that religion and traditional practices have made life difficult for some women. They told me that in some cases parents actively encouraged and persuaded their daughters to walk out of their marriage, especially after the recent ethno-religious conflicts in Jos and its environs.

Their communities felt that the women in inter-faith marriages were no longer safe as they were regarded as informants and objects of suspicion by their husband’s relatives and other friends within the community.²² This suspicion that they could not be trusted not only affects their marriage life but also their economic, political and professional life.

22 This was a result of personal discussions with women on their experiences in the Jos conflict during fieldwork for this thesis at the Institute of Governance and Social Research (IGSR). Field notes 2012-2013.

In another instance of the ethnic struggle that women face, and echoing the quote from the BBC report noted earlier, a former Director General of the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB), Dr Lami Hamza from Plateau state, married to a Muslim man from Kaduna State, had her appointment queried by parties from both her own state and her husband’s state. They claimed that she was taking up the quota of the real indigenes from Kaduna while being from Plateau, which she refuted (Tyoden, 2006: 6-7). That is to say, while the public debate ostensibly centred on her claim about her state of origin the controversy mainly centred on her religious beliefs and on her gender.

The problems that women face in both their private and professional lives undoubtedly contribute to their under-representation in Nigerian public life. Despite the fact that women constitute just under half of the country’s population, their representation in elective and appointive positions still stands at between 1.6 percent and 8.0 percent.

For example, out of 49 ministers and advisers at that time, only 6 were women, and only 4 out of 52 ambassadors were women (IDEA, 2005: 8-9; Alubo, 2008:17; 2011:

90).

Despite a slight trend upwards since 1999, women still hold fewer than 10 percent of political offices at all levels of national politics. However, this distribution is subject to variation throughout the country. While women in some parts of Nigeria such as the East and West are relatively better represented compared to the North, they have very little influence in other areas and their representation is quite low in the Middle Belt

area. This may be partly linked to the ubiquity of local conflicts²³ and ethnic/religious issues.

It could be noted at this point that often in these struggles, women are left out of political discussions or are threatened directly or indirectly by an insecure environment, and so they stay out of the public domain, while those women who brave the harsh political competition come face to face with life threatening danger. For example, on 3^rd May, 2003, during the Nasarawa State Assembly elections, Mrs Maimuna Joyce Katai, then a commissioner in Nasarawa State, was beaten to death and shot twice by youth militia groups²⁴ while trying to protect the ballot box in her polling unit (Best, 2004).²⁵

While political assassinations are also directed at men, the fact that women, already marginalised, face even more threats than men contributes to their under-representation in the political sphere. For example, the dominant forms of Islam and Christianity in the Middle Belt suggest that the purity of women is guaranteed by their staying out of politics and public life. Thus the women in the Middle Belt face many dilemmas: the highly conflictual environment in which they live exposes them to a disproportionate threat of discrimination and violence, both in their private and public lives; that they live in a generally patriarchal culture which takes little account of their

23 Refer to Arowolo & Aluko, (2010).

24 Her murderers were suspected to be Egbura Youths who may have been hired to disrupt the 2003 State Assembly Elections. Others versions of the incident indicate the insecurity and restiveness that sometimes pervades the Nigerian political landscape, thus, leading to militia groups taking the laws into their hands and threatening both life and property. The works of Best (2004) provide more insight into the incident.

25 This is one out of many examples of insecure environments, which makes it quite difficult for women to engage in politics and it also signifies to some extent the failure of the state in conducting free and fair elections. Refer to the works of Best (2004) on the Bassa-Egbura Conflict in Toto Local Government Area.

needs; and lastly, their religious identities – politicised locally – discourages their engagement and participation in public life. Affected disproportionally by local conflict due to local interpretations of custom and religion, as well as family pressure and public hostility, these same factors prevent them from addressing the problems with which they are faced.