Last week Mrs. Ibukun Awosika made history as the first woman to be named to chair the board of First Bank, Nigeria’s oldest banking institution. Her appointment was given further resonance by the reports that pointed out that the boards of three of Nigeria’s leading banks – Guaranty Trust Bank, Access Bank and First Bank – are now chaired by women, with all of them taking office within the last six months.
It is a milestone worth celebrating. It also throws up an opportunity to start a debate about the Nigerian woman and the country’s culture of shatter-proof glass ceilings. I’m not sure how many people recall that in 2013, the then Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi outlined a campaign by the bank to increase the representation of women at executive levels in Nigerian banks. Speaking at the Isaac Moghalu Foundation Lecture and Symposium in April 2013, Sanusi said that the Central Bank was pushing that by 2014, a minimum of 30 per cent of board positions, and 40 per cent of senior management roles, would be held by women.
Sanusi also noted that the bank was now requiring all banks must include alongside their annual accounting statements a statement of their “gender positions”; adding that the CBN would embark on a “name and shame” campaign to ensure that women got more representation. There was one interesting statistic that Sanusi put forward in that speech, that, in the first 50 years of the Central Bank’s existence, only four women ever made it to the rank of Director. As evidence of the sort of change he was pushing, he said that there were now (as at 2013), “seven or eight female directors”, and that this was the outcome of “a conscious policy of looking for qualified women to take these positions.”
Sanusi has since moved on from the Central Bank, but we have no idea to what extent the bank has advanced his campaign. I’m not sure the naming-and-shaming is still in progress, or the requirement that the banks publish their gender statements. Perhaps now is a good time to hope that Governor Godwin Emefiele will be able to find time, amid the feverish battles to defend the naira, to re-jig the gender campaign.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s even tougher for Nigerian women in politics and the public sector. Only eight of Nigeria’s 109 (nine per cent) senators are women. In the House of Representatives, it’s even more dismal: only 18 of 360 representatives are women (five per cent). In a country where half of the population are women, this is preposterous. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the sub-Saharan average for the proportion of women in national parliament is 22 per cent, so, even by African standards we’re not doing well at all. (The Nordic countries are the world leaders, with 42 per cent).
No doubt democracy has done much better than military rule, in terms of high-profile government positions for women. The Military Councils that once traditionally ruled this country had no place for women, to a large extent because women were grossly under-represented in the military. Even the cabinets, which typically had room for civilians, tended to binge on testosterone. Military President Ibrahim Babangida took it to record-books heights when he ran Nigeria for seven years without a single female minister. It wasn’t until his final year in office (a transitional/interim government, by the way) that one woman – Bola Kuforiji-Olubi – came in, as Secretary for Commerce and Tourism. (Interestingly Olubi was the first woman to be named Chairman of a bank in Nigeria; leading the board of UBA from 1984 to 1990).
By taking the exclusively male club that is the Nigerian military out of power, democracy has helped weaken the glass ceiling. President Obasanjo made an effort, promoting women to high profile positions, a move that produced people like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Oby Ezekwesili, Ifueko Omoigui-Okauru, Nenadi Usman and others. President Goodluck Jonathan upped those standards remarkably, and deserves credit for that. It’s now up to President Buhari to move things forward. The argument for increasing the political representation of women is a simple one, really. Women make up half of Nigeria’s population. Any country leaving half of its population out of the political and public-policy leadership turf is not taking itself seriously, and is not ready to be taken seriously.
There’s an important point to be made about this matter of gender representation. It is that while increasing the absolute numbers of women in leadership positions in the private and public sectors is important, that should not be the end of the story. We must equally focus on ensuring that the conditions also markedly improve for the masses of women who may not necessarily be aspiring to managerial positions in the public or private sectors. Our efforts should be directed, not only at the conspicuous glass ceiling, but at the myriad easily-overlooked obstacles that litter the ground as well. Whether or not a woman aspires to rise to a leadership position within a corporation or in government, every woman should be able to function on whatever turf she chooses – starting a business, being a mother, even – without being penalised for being a woman.
The case of Rwanda offers a useful illustration of an instance in which smashing a glass ceiling does not automatically translate into progress on-the-ground progress. More than 60 per cent of the legislators in Rwanda’s Chamber of Deputies are women; the highest such ratio in the world. (In the 2014 Global Gender Gap Index, Rwanda is listed seventh, just after the Nordic countries. Nigeria is in 118th position, out of 142 countries). But a few years ago the government presented to the parliament a bill seeking to reduce the amount of time granted for maternity leave from 12 weeks to 6 weeks. While the bill included a provision for extending the leave, if a woman wishes, it proposed that anyone taking that extension would have to endure an 80 per cent pay cut for the period of the extension.
What was surprising was that there didn’t seem to be much internal opposition to the ill-advised move within the chamber, even though it was dominated by women. Fortunately, the backlash – which has come mainly from outside the parliament – appears to be yielding fruit, as the government is now proposing to introduce a Maternity Leave Benefits Scheme that will provide funding to guarantee full pay for the entire 12-week period.
Going by that scenario, it is clearly not enough to judge our banks by the numbers of women they are willing to put in management or chairperson-ship positions. We should be judging them by their attitudes to nursing mothers and maternity leave, by their willingness to tackle entrenched cultures of sexual harassment, and by the policies they make and enforce to tackle the disadvantages that the traditional design of the work environment throws in the way of women. Even the language of bank advertising needs to be examined for the ways in which it sometimes reinforces unhelpful stereotypes against women. I recall listening to a Bank PHB radio advert a few years ago. It had two men exchanging stories about how they were being bombarded by phone calls from women demanding gifts of N25, 000. It turned out that all the women asking for money wanted to ‘invest’ in Bank PHB’s ‘Stash & Cash’ promo, which required deposits of N25, 000 or multiples of it. Listening to the advert, I didn’t think it was the duty of a serious bank to be reinforcing unhelpful gender stereotypes.
The journey ahead will be a long one, no doubt. And having more women having a say in how our banks are run is a great starting point. Huge congratulations therefore to Osaretin Demuren (GTBank), Mosun Belo-Olusoga (Access Bank), and Ibukun Awosika (First Bank). I’d also like to acknowledge the other women at the highest levels of banking in Nigeria: Bola Adesola and Sola David-Borha, CEOs of Standard Chartered Bank Nigeria, and Stanbic IBTC Holdings respectively, and Sarah Alade, Deputy Governor (and one-time acting Governor) of the Central Bank of Nigeria. May the ranks continue to swell with women.
By Tolu Ogunlesi
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