By Laraba MUREY
The leader of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has advocated for the fair treatment of women, urging men to give women more access to leadership positions.
Adebayo urged men to go beyond sentiments and platitudes to recognize and appreciate the important roles women play in the society.
He made the call recently while speaking at the ‘Women in sustainability Africa Summit and launch’ in Accra, Ghana.
The SDP presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, who was a guest speaker at the women’s event, disagreed with the notion that certain jobs are not meant for women but for men.
He noted that some of the stereotypes don’t work well, stressing that it is not enough to come out and say that women are the most perfect leaders or that they can’t perform certain job without first giving them the opportunity.
His words: “Let us use data in dealing with women, not sentiment. We did an experiment in Nigeria when we started putting ministers in places like petroleum, finance and all those other places where the men used to steal all the money.
“We started putting women there and they performed well but after some time, we stopped loving these women because we started seeing the same problem.
“So, what we came up with is that when dealing with women and when dealing with men, you must set up systems that work. There is no system that a woman cannot run successfully and there is no system, if it is not well designed, that a woman cannot falter.
“So, we must go beyond sentiment and platitude; we must give women access to leadership. We must put all the safeguards there as well and not say because someone is a woman, she can’t perform certain functions.”
He noted that the culture of borrowing is posing a serious challenge to Africans, noting that: “What I want us to understand is that the language we speak in discussing challenges in Africa are borrowed languages. These borrowed languages come with borrowed money, borrowed ideas and if we are not making progress, we need to understand that, maybe, we should reduce borrowing money, and if we cannot reduce borrowing money immediately, we should reduce borrowing ideas, so that we can think originally about our issues.”
