Two Out of Eighteen: What Nigeria's 2027 Presidential Ballot Says About Women in Politics

When Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission published its final list of candidates for the January 2027 presidential election, the headline numbers told a familiar story. Eighteen political parties will field presidential candidates. Only two of them are women.

The names on the ballot
The two female candidates are Ada Elizabeth Frederick Okwori of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and Nkem Esther Okereke of the National Rescue Movement (NRM). Okwori holds a distinction of her own: she is the first woman to found and register a political party in Nigeria. Okereke secured her party's presidential ticket at a national convention in Abuja in late May 2026.

Both will appear alongside sixteen male rivals including incumbent President Bola Tinubu, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former Anambra Governor Peter Obi, and Oyo State Governor Oluseyi Makinde in what INEC and observers expect to be one of the most fiercely contested races in Nigeria's recent history.

Two out of eighteen works out to roughly 11 percent of presidential candidates. Add the four women named as running mates across the various tickets, and women's overall representation on the presidential ballot as either principal or deputy still sits under one in five slots.

Not a new pattern
Nigerian women running for the presidency is not a novelty, but it has also never been normalised. Sarah Jibril made history as Nigeria's first female presidential aspirant in 1992 and went on to contest in multiple subsequent cycles.

Oby Ezekwesili, a former World Bank vice president and co-founder of the Bring Back Our Girls movement, ran in 2019. Remi Sonaiya became the first woman to contest a Nigerian presidential election under a registered political party in 2015. Each candidacy drew attention, and each ended without a serious claim on the presidency itself.

The pattern repeating in 2027 a small number of women contesting, none from the dominant parties most likely to win suggests the barrier isn't a lack of ambition or capable candidates, but the structure of the parties and the financing that surrounds Nigerian elections.

The wider picture: down the ballot too
The scarcity of women is not confined to the presidency.

Of the 4,408 candidates cleared by INEC to contest National Assembly seats in 2027, only 443 are women under 10 percent.

The Allied Peoples Movement fielded the largest number of female legislative candidates of any party, with eleven women contesting Senate seats and forty-two seeking House of Representatives seats, but even that stands out only because the baseline elsewhere is so low.

Nigeria's numbers compare poorly with several of its West African neighbours and sit well below the global average for women's parliamentary representation.

Analysts and civil society groups have long pointed to the cost of Nigerian party nomination forms, the informal "godfather" structures that determine who gets a viable ticket, and the persistence of a political culture that treats high office as a male domain, as the compounding reasons women rarely make it past the primaries of the major parties.

Why it matters beyond symbolism
The concern raised by commentators is not simply representational fairness for its own sake, though that matters.

Women make up roughly half of Nigeria's electorate, turn out in large numbers to vote, and are frequently the organisers who mobilise communities during campaigns yet remain largely absent from the ballot itself at its highest levels. That gap has been described as a democratic deficit: a system that depends on women's participation as voters and grassroots organisers while structurally limiting their path to becoming candidates.

Whether Okwori or Okereke can translate their candidacies into a meaningful share of the vote remains to be seen; neither runs on a platform with the financial or structural muscle of the dominant parties.

But their presence on the ballot keeps alive a conversation Nigerian civil society has pushed for over a decade from proposed affirmative-action bills reserving legislative seats for women, to renewed calls ahead of 2027 for internal party reforms that would lower the cost and political risk of a woman seeking her party's top ticket.

The bottom line
Two candidates out of eighteen is progress only in the narrowest sense it means the ballot is not entirely male, as has sometimes nearly been the case in past cycles. It is not evidence that Nigeria's parties have opened a genuine path for women to contend for the presidency on equal footing. Until that changes, the 2027 election will again make the case, by omission, for reforms that have been proposed and stalled for years.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,

International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. ( USIP)

[email protected]
+233555275880

References
Voice of Nigeria, "2027: INEC Releases List of Presidential Candidates" https://von.gov.ng/2027-inec-releases-list-of-presidential-candidates/

Channels Television, "INEC Publishes Final List Of Presidential Candidates For 2027 Election [FULL LIST]" https://www.channelstv.com/2026/09/12/inec-publishes-final-list-of-presidential-candidates-for-2027-election/

Leadership, "2027: Only 443 Women Among 4,408 National Assembly Candidates" https://leadership.ng/2027-only-443-women-among-4408-national-assembly-candidates/

Legit.ng, "INEC publishes final list of 18 presidential candidates for 2027 elections" https://www.legit.ng/politics/1730456-full-list-2027-presidential-candidates-inec-finally-cleared/

Nigerian Democratic Report, "2027 Elections: INEC's Final Presidential Candidate List Includes Two Women" https://www.ndr.org.ng/2027-elections-inecs-final-presidential-candidate-list-includes-two-women/

Pegasus Reporters, "INEC Publishes Final List of 2027 Presidential Candidates" https://www.pegasusreporters.com/2026/09/13/inec-publishes-final-list-of-2027-presidential-candidates/

Politics Digest, "2027: Nigeria Awaits Its Female Presidential Candidates" (Nafisat Bello, March 22, 2026) https://politicsdigest.ng/nigerian-female-presidential/

Wikipedia, "2027 Nigerian general election" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2027_Nigerian_general_election