* Condemns Military Coups
AS debate continues on 2022 N16.39 trillion national budget announced by President Muhammadu Buhari, Women Economic Collectives (WECs), has been urged to speak out and step up advocacy for women empowerment and inclusion in resource allocations.
The Director General of Micheal Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies (MINILS), Comrade Issa Aremu, made this call at the opening session of a two-day Advocacy and Communication collaborative workshop for the women in cooperatives working for economic empowerment in Ilorin.
The training workshop, sponsored by Melinda Gates Foundation, was organised for 35 participants drawn from various cooperative groups by development Research and Projects Centers (dRPC) and Micheal Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies (MINILS).
Comrade Aremu said notwithstanding the economic down turn occasioned by Covid-19 global pandemic, the 2022 federal appropriation bill as well as states’ budgets had allocated significant resources to capital and recurrent expenditures, education, health and social sector. He therefore urged women in cooperatives “to speak out through advocacy in order to enhance women participation and inclusion in national development.”
The bane of women inclusion in development process was due to what Aremu called “unacceptable silence of women in the face of unjust resource allocation process”. He therefore advised women in cooperatives to speak out for more resources for small and medium enterprises, health, child care and infrastructural development.
The Director General praised dRPC for strengthening the capacity of women in economic cooperatives to “conduct evidence-based advocacy to national policy makers and other stakeholders with messages of the value and importance of national investment”.
On Wednesday as part of the capacity building programs, the participants went on advocacy visits to Kwara State’s ministries of Finance, Enterprise and Innovation and Agriculture in a bid to advocate for financial and economic inclusion in the preparation and implementation of the state in 2022.
The Director General hailed the struggle of women for empowerment since Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999, adding that with as many as 50 notable female appointees by President Buhari and 9 female cabinet members by Governor Abdulrasaaq, democracy has ensured women participation, which he said long periods of military dictatorship had denied them.
“Women must just not be active participants in a democracy but defenders of democratic process which has promoted female inclusion that the military rule denied for decades in Nigeria,” he said.
Comrade Aremu commended the suspension of Sudan from the Africa Union (AU) following the recent unconstitutional and forcible removal of the civilian transition in the Sudan.
“The new military usurpers in some African countries are political dinosaurs whose time had long been better forgotten. Nobody should ever rule in Africa without a freedom given mandate in free and fair election. The coup plotters in Karthoum should vacate power, abandon brinkmanship and restore civility,” Aremu said.
