Adebayo canvasses access to leadership positions for women
The Leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and 2023 presidential candidate of the party, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has called on the men folks to allow the women to have access to leadership positions.
Adebayo made the call recently while speaking at the ‘Women in sustainability Africa summit and launch’ in Accra, Ghana.
The SDP leader argued that women equally have the capacity to lead, stating that men should go beyond sentiments and platitudes to appreciate the important roles women play in society.
He made the call recently while speaking at the ‘Women in sustainability Africa summit and launch’ in Accra, Ghana.
” Rather than being sentimental, the women’s ability to perform certain jobs believed to be exclusively for men should be subjected to data analysis. Once a proper system is put in place, there is no system that women cannot run successfully. 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. If a system is not well designed, the person will not be able to function well, man or woman”, said Adebayo.
He added “The labour laws did not recognize any work done outside the factory as work because they defined labour as how much you pay per hour and nobody will pay for breastfeeding. Nobody will pay you for making the home conducive. The culture of borrowing is posing a serious challenge to Africans. 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.”
He also called for cooperation, saying, “The issue we have in Africa is cooperation. We need to cooperate as a society because a society that is not doing well overall has poverty, poor infrastructure and has no luxury for gender fight.”
Adebayo called for cooperation and support across Africa, saying, “I want the whole of Africa to know that what has started here is going to continue across the continent just like all the ideas of our leaders, like Kwame Nkruma, who started in Ghana but it went round Africa. That’s why we had the OAU before it became the AU. So, the spirit which started in Ghana is that in Africa we are one people and the challenges we are facing have confirmed that we are one people and the solution must be based on unity and cooperation.”
