{"id":74366,"date":"2025-08-27T14:26:59","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=74366"},"modified":"2025-08-27T14:26:59","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:26:59","slug":"women-youth-group-demands-reserved-seats-bill-to-end-political-exclusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2025\/08\/27\/women-youth-group-demands-reserved-seats-bill-to-end-political-exclusion\/","title":{"rendered":"Women, Youth Group Demands Reserved Seats Bill to End Political Exclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The Women and Youth for Nigeria Alliance (WAY4Nigeria), has called for urgent reforms to end the marginalisation of women and youth in politics, warning that exclusion threatens Nigeria\u2019s democracy.<\/p>\n<p>At a press conference in Abuja, the coalition criticised political parties, institutions, and the media for sidelining over 70% of the population from leadership.<\/p>\n<p>Chairman Victor Terhemba described the trend as \u201cdeliberate exclusion masked as procedure,\u201d noting that women hold only 3.7% of Senate seats and 3.9% of House of Representatives seats, while youth candidacy has dwindled due to prohibitive nomination costs.<\/p>\n<p>WAY4Nigeria also presented findings from a post-2023 election study linking misinformation, party bias, and harmful social norms to exclusion.<\/p>\n<p>Terhemba accused the media of amplifying gendered and age-based disinformation that undermines trust in democratic institutions.<\/p>\n<p>The group urged the National Assembly to pass the Reserved Seats for Women Bill, alongside constitutional and electoral reforms to open up candidacy and reduce political violence.<\/p>\n<p>It warned that civil society efforts alone cannot fix the crisis.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe exclusion of women and youth is not just their issue, it is a national crisis. No nation can achieve stability or development while shutting out the majority of its citizens from leadership,\u201d Terhemba said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata &nbsp; The Women and Youth for Nigeria Alliance (WAY4Nigeria), has called for urgent reforms to end the marginalisation of women and youth in politics, warning that exclusion threatens Nigeria\u2019s democracy. At a press conference in Abuja, the coalition criticised political parties, institutions, and the media for sidelining over 70% of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":74367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172,186],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74368,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74366\/revisions\/74368"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}