Two Of The Eighteen People On The Presidential Ballot Are Women

Geo-Political News

Abuja · Tuesday 22 September 2026

Of the eighteen presidential candidates INEC published for the 16 January election, two are women: Ada Elizabeth Fredrick Okwori of the National Democratic Party, the NDP, and Nkem Esther Okereke of the National Rescue Movement, the NRM. Okwori is the first woman in Nigeria to establish and register a political party. Okereke won her party's ticket at its convention in Abuja on 29 May.

woman speaking podium audience Photograph by SMKN 1 Gantar via Unsplash.

Eleven per cent, and the number that produced it

Two out of eighteen is 11.1 per cent of the ballot. Neither candidate leads a party with the structure to win, and saying so is not a dismissal of either woman. It is a description of where the filtering happened, which was not on the ballot paper but in the primaries of the parties that can win.

What a Nigerian presidential primary costs. Nomination and expression of interest forms alone run into the tens of millions of naira at the major parties, before delegate travel, accommodation and everything that is never written down. That cost structure selects for people with access to existing money, and existing money in Nigerian politics is overwhelmingly held by men. The ballot is the last step, and the outcome was decided months earlier.

The record, unchanged across cycles

Office	Women who have held it
President	None
Vice President	None
State governor, elected	None

Nigeria has had women as chief justice, finance minister and central bank deputy governor.

The jobs Nigerian women have reached are the ones you are appointed to. The barrier is specific, and it is the ballot.

Why it is worth naming them anyway

Because the coverage of an eighteen-candidate field collapses to three names within a day, and the other fifteen become a number. Okwori and Okereke will not be president in January. They are on the ballot, they got there through party processes that are hostile by design, and the first of them built the party she is standing for. That is a matter of record, and it is how the record eventually changes.

Reporting: Vanguard, Nigerian Democratic Report and LEADERSHIP.

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